The X Prize Foundation, which has previously created contests around private manned spaceflight and sending a robot to the moon announced a prize for fixing healthcare today (via Jay Drayer). From a moonshot perspective, this is likely to be the most difficult to date…even for them to create relevant metrics from which to judge the winner.
Contest details will be worked out by early next year. But essentially the competition will look for ways to “dramatically improve” cost and quality, said Brad Fluegel, a WellPoint executive vice president.
WellPoint and X Prize officials note that U.S. health care spending is projected to reach $4.2 trillion by 2016, or 20 percent of the country’s gross domestic product. Such spending in other developed countries makes up 11 percent of the GDP or less.
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For those of you who haven’t seen it, BusinessWeek just came out with a nice primer on Health Benefits as we go into both elections and the annual benefit selection process.
As we would expect, microbusiness is the leading edge of benefit shifts, as these owners of very small businesses bear both the full brunt of benefit costs and need to determine appropriate trade-offs relative to business survival. The statistic that floored me was how quickly employee benefits were being jettisoned by microbusiness due to cost.
More respondents—67%—reported having health insurance for themselves, as compared with 54.9% in 2005. However, there was a shocking drop in the percentage that said they’re providing coverage for their full-time employees. In 2005, 46.2% said they were offering employee coverage; in 2008 the number went down to 18.6%. That’s one of the most massive drops we saw in terms of all the questions we asked across both surveys, and the sole reason is cost, which was cited by 65% as the top barrier to providing coverage.
So it seems the cost-saving impulse is a strong one going into this year, and I’d expect, given the recent economic conditions that it will become even stronger. So how does this reflect on the cheaper, HSA option? The results appear to be mixed, largely because in many cases the savings don’t go to the worker, while they bear the burden of additional administrative confusion.
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