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Value-Based Healthcare.  There, I said it…

I had fun on Wednesday sitting on the healthcare reform panel at the Dow Jones Limited Partners Summit.   The conversation centered on investment trends in healthcare as updated for the passage of PPACA, during which I blurted out the concept of value-based healthcare, a pretty complex and to some extent novel concept, and a cornerstone to many of Psilos’ VC investment strategies.  This was subsequently reported, and to Jennifer Rossa’s credit, she provided enough detail around my comment to correctly convey the concept.

There are important nuances, however.  This post is the beginning of a series that will explore the ins-and-outs of Value-Based Healthcare.

Value-Based Healthcare: Definition #1:

Value-Based Healthcare, or more specifically, Value-Based Health Insurance Design, its sobriquet being simply, Value-Based, intends to mitigate the Moral Hazard inherent in low cost-sharing health insurance coverage.

If we were to take an insurance or advanced finance class together we would spend a lot of time talking about Moral Hazard and Adverse Selection, the two primary business risks that underpin managing financial institutions, insurance companies and banks included.  Failure to manage these risks properly can lead to disaster (in fact, recently Moral Hazard and Adverse Selection got the better of the mortgage banking business, a primary cause of the financial crisis).

Moral Hazard reflects the reality that a party insulated from a risk (like an insured or a borrower) will behave differently than if it were fully exposed to the risk.

Adverse Selection reflects the reality that the very nature of a party’s desire to seek insulation from risk reflects a greater risk of loss.  For example, parties that are either sick or expect to get sick have a higher demand for health insurance.  Similarly, parties in the market for a mortgage that have a concern that they may default are more attracted to low-down-payment mortgages.

Underwriting models are designed in part to set prices to countervail the risks of Moral Hazard and Adverse Selection.  This is more easily accomplished in an underwriting model where each policy gets priced individually, like automobile insurance.  In this model individuals are placed in broad price cohorts based on age, gender, style of car, etc., and then adjustments to the policy price are made based on individual attributes like historical driving record.  Moral Hazard and Adverse Selection are less prevalent in insurance markets where policies are individually underwritten and where the underwriter will be the party that ultimately pays the claims on any policy.  Absent these conditions the risks of Moral Hazard and Adverse Selection will always be lurking.

Such is the case in the current market for employer-based health insurance (also called Group Model health insurance).

Let’s start with Moral Hazard.  Today many employer-based health insurance models feature low cost-sharing, meaning that patients pay a very small amount of the health resources they consume.  Here the economic question is whether the value of a healthcare service exceeds the out-of-pocket cost to the patient, which is a small fraction of the actual costs.  Moral Hazard comes into play because the insurance insulates the patient from full payment, thus altering behavior toward increased healthcare consumption, a phenomenon some believe is encouraged by the fact that providers (doctors and hospitals) are generally not at risk either and are paid on a fee-for-service basis.

Consider what might happen if the out-of-pocket costs to the patient were raised.  In insurance markets where patients could opt out and choose not to buy insurance, an increase in out-of-pocket costs would certainly result in some people, probably the healthiest, declining coverage.  This would cause premiums to rise, because the insured pool would be sicker on average, causing more of the healthiest people to decline, increasing the risk of the pool, increasing the premiums, and so on, into an Adverse Selection spiral.

In health insurance markets we need the healthiest people to stay in the market in order for the underwriting to work at reasonable levels of insurance premium.  This is one of the reasons why health insurance is provided by employers.  Employers, or coalitions of employers, are able to deliver large enough populations of sick and healthy people for the underwriting to work.  The participation of large numbers of employees mitigates Adverse Selection and as a result many large employers choose to self-insure (tax incentives is another reason employer-based health insurance dominates – more on this another time).

Nonetheless, in employer-based health insurance we are still left with Moral Hazard, and research seems to back the notion that its degree is inversely correlated with the percentage out-of-pocket paid by patients (low out-of-pocket = high Moral Hazard = high healthcare consumption).

So the question becomes, if we are looking for an employer-based health insurance model that will counter increased healthcare consumption (and believe me, we are), why not just increase the out-of-pocket payments and reduce Moral Hazard?

It turns out not to be that simple.  Please give this some thought and we’ll dig a little deeper next time…