Redesigning Employee Health Incentives ... - JHPPL News and Notes

Buried as Section 2705 of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) is a provision of potentially momentous importance. Beginning in 2014, employers may use up to 30% of the total amount of employees? health insurance premiums (50% at the discretion of the secretary of health and human services) to provide outcome-based wellness incentives. Such rewards can ?be in the form of a discount or rebate of a premium or contribution, a waiver of all or part of a cost-sharing mechanism (such as deductibles, copayments, or coinsurance), the absence of a surcharge, or the value of a benefit that would otherwise not be provided under the plan.?

Although it may seem obvious that charging higher premiums for smoking (or high body-mass index, cholesterol, or blood pressure) would encourage people to modify their habits to lower their premiums, evidence that differential premiums change health-related behavior is scant. Indeed, we?re unaware of any health insurance data that have convincingly demonstrated such effects.

via Redesigning Employee Health Incentives ? Lessons from Behavioral Economics ? NEJM.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 4th, 2011 at 2:25 PM and is filed under NN20-Articles-Papers, PPACA-ComparativeEffectiveness, PPACA-Impact-Consumers, PPACA-Impact-Employers, PPACA-Impact-Outcomes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Source: http://jhpplnewsandnotes.wordpress.com/2011/08/04/redesigning-employee-health-incentives-%E2%80%94-lessons-from-behavioral-economics-%E2%80%94-nejm/

vita hop stevie nicks carlos beltran pkd pkd orlando