Consumer-Driven Health Care Revisited

A few years ago, consumer-driven health care was being touted as the latest, greatest hope for companies desperate to rein in their employee medical insurance costs. Fast-forward to the present, though, and the reality is a health-care movement that's more evolution than revolution. Companies have been slow to offer consumer-driven plans, and employees have shown no great eagerness to enroll in them.

According to Mercer Health & Benefits LLC's National Survey of Employer-Sponsored Health Plans 2005, which covers more than 3,000 organizations with at least 10 employees, only 2 percent of companies offered a consumer-driven health-plan option to their workforce last year, and just 1 percent of all those companies' employees were enrolled in the plans.

At the same time, the number of companies that offer a consumer-driven plan is expected to increase significantly this year. According to the Mercer Health & Benefits survey, 11 percent of plan sponsors report they are very likely to offer such a program in 2006. And the larger the organization, the more likely it is to offer a consumer-driven option to its workforce.

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