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The Blackstone Group: The Future of Employer-Sponsored Health Insurance

  • Next to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, employers are the largest purchasing block of health care in the world.
  • Creative interplay between employers and government has accelerated many innovations, including quality measurement, Medicare Advantage, transparency and payment reform.
  • There is a historic paradigm shift currently going on in employer-sponsored health benefits – the era of consumerism is here.
  • Previously, employers paid 80 percent of costs and left the rest to health insurers to manage. It was then up to employees to decide how engaged they wanted to be in their health.
  • Today, employers protect employees financially against catastrophic expenses and fund preventative services. The vast number of health care decisions between the catastrophic and the preventative are up to the employees. To allow employees to effectively make those health care decisions, enough of their money has to be at stake.
  • For consumerism to work, price and quality transparency are critical.
  • As we continue to reform and reshape U.S. health care, there are three key questions to ask:
  • How do you keep people healthy?
  • How do you give people the information they need and engage them to make the best decisions?
  • How do you find out which doctors are the best and align incentives so that employees are likely to choose them and the doctors themselves are paid based on their outcomes?

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