Consumers Not Keen On Suing
Consumers might accept a federal "patients rights" law that would include relatively weak health plan liability provisions, according to a survey conducted for the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Harvard School of Public Health.
Forty-eight percent of the consumers under age 65 who were interviewed for the survey said they had experienced problems with their health plans in the past year, and 4 percent said they had experienced problems that had seriously hurt their health.
Eighty-one percent want Congress to pass a "patients bill of rights" to defend them in such situations, up from 74 percent in April 1999.
However, only 16 percent of those surveyed said that Congress should give health plan members the right to sue plans for unlimited compensation for economic losses, pain and suffering, and punitive damages. Eighty percent said consumers should only be able to sue for full compensation for economic losses, and limited compensation for pain and suffering.
Other survey results suggest that the liability issue "has gotten to be too difficult for people to understand," said Robert Blendon, a Harvard health policy professor who worked on the survey.
Consumers appear to be so confused about liability that Democrats could probably compromise on this issue to get a patients' rights bill signed by President George W. Bush, without getting any flak from voters, Mr. Blendon suggested.
Researchers from Princeton Survey Research Associates in Princeton, N.J., interviewed 1,205 adults over age 18 for the survey in July and August.
Current federal law sharply restricts the ability of members of most employer-sponsored health plans to sue the plans for anything other than the funds needed to pay for medical services.
The U.S. House and Senate have both passed separate managed care reform bills that would give members of employer-sponsored plans some ability to sue. The House version, supported by the Republicans, would put tighter limits on the right to sue.
The bills also include many other plan quality provisions, including sections that would set up a national external review system for resolving coverage disputes.
Some states already allow residents to sue state-regulated health plans, and many states have enacted plan quality provisions similar to those in the federal bills. However, surveys have found that only about half of consumers know whether their states have passed managed care plan quality bills, and one-quarter think Congress has already passed a federal patients rights bill, according to Drew Altman, president of the Menlo Park, Calif.-based Kaiser Family Foundation.
Consumers also gave relatively low marks to the importance of passing patients rights legislation. Indeed, only 7 percent ranked passing patients rights legislation as the most important national health policy issue.
Thirty percent gave the highest importance marks to making health care more affordable; 15 percent to making prescription drugs more affordable for the elderly; and 13 percent to making Medicare more financially sound for future generations.
The health insurance industry has spent heavily on advertising campaigns designed to convince consumers that federal managed care legislation would drive up health care costs and reduce access to coverage, Mr. Altman said. But "most peoples views werent changed by the ads," he contends.
Indeed, only 22 percent of the consumers surveyed said that the cost of enacting patients rights would be high enough to outweigh the benefits, and only 19 percent think the legislation would make employers a lot more likely to stop offering health benefits.
Members of Congress also tend to think of a patients rights bill as "free" legislation, because they believe it will have no effect on the federal budget, according to Mr. Altman.
Allison Bell is an assistant editor with NU's Life & Health/Financial Services edition.
Reproduced from National Underwriter Property & Casualty/Risk & Benefits Management Edition, September 10, 2001. Copyright 2001 by The National Underwriter Company in the serial publication. All rights reserved.Copyright in this article as an independent work may be held by the author.
© Touchpoint Markets, All Rights Reserved. Request academic re-use from www.copyright.com. All other uses, submit a request to TMSalesOperations@arc-network.com. For more information visit Asset & Logo Licensing.