Industry as Consumer: Health Planning and Consumer Health Information

Abstract

From the dilemmas arising out of industry’s expanded responsibilities as financer and provider of health care, it is a short step to a more active role in efforts at the community level to improve the delivery system and, at the level of individual decision-making, to assist workers in becoming better informed consumers of health care. Exploring piecemeal cost control strategies for employee benefit packages, or contracting with the external delivery system for supplementary services that may seem inadequate or inefficient can impress on industry the complexity of the problems in the health care delivery system, and the extent to which they are interlocking and self-perpetuating. These experiences have compelled some in industry to rephrase the question, shifting its focus from a limited perspective on how the firm can moderate the rising cost of its benefit package or rationalize its in-house services to a more global view of the delivery system as a whole and an attempt to discern why costs are rising throughout the system and what can be done.