This latest study<\/a>, published by Mary Ann Liebert Publishers, using only 188 patients as it\u2019s sample, has surmised that cost reductions on medications and insurance co-pays is a major step forward in controlling their glycemic levels for these diabetic patients. There is, the study suggests, a \u201c\u2026 strong association between poor medication adherence, adverse clinical outcomes, and increased overall costs in diabetes and other chronic conditions, increased cost sharing actually may increase overall hearth care costs.\u201d<\/p>\n\n
There are two ways to look at this:\u00a0 Health Insurance is a matter of spreading the costs of healthcare out to a much larger group of somehow similar health care patients. And the more patients in the group the more predictable and manageable the group costs can be amortized by the number of patients\u2026 but this assumes that we are actually being included in groups of similar patients. How would a patient know that as this is a function of the actuaries and not health experts, most likely. It is also likely that health insurance organizations are not pairing us with similar medication adherence, but\u00a0\u00a0 with people of similar age or business categories. Maybe it\u2019s better that we don\u2019t know the details.<\/p>\n
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The other way is to look at this (and maybe actuaries do this) is to group patients with proven greater adherence than other groups. I believe this would likely achieve better health outcomes and reduce costs to the patients in such a group. This is referred to as VBID (value based insurance design) in the study. I would rather be in a group of patients with similar medication adherence because those patients who are adherent will almost certainly lower the overall costs of healthcare; those patients who are medication adherent are more likely to take a more active role in their own healthcare. If this were the case, insurance companies should be more willing to pay the co-pay for medications and drop much of the annual deductible. Regardless of the chronic condition, if patients are fully adherent, it becomes predictable that all parties, including patients and their health insurance organizations, will save significant savings over groups of patients who are not adherent.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This may sound familiar if you\u2019ve read any of my blogs previously. It seems that many of these studies on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,47,58,20,21,66,25],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.medtexter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4638"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.medtexter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.medtexter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.medtexter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.medtexter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4638"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.medtexter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4638\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.medtexter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4638"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.medtexter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4638"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.medtexter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4638"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}