Study: Higher co-pays cut hospital visits

New research suggests that hospital visits decrease as the level of cost the patient bears go up. While this might be worrisome--we don't want people to avoid hospital trips and end up sicker--the study also found that the higher co-pays actually didn't have a negative effect on patient health. In fact, they saw no increase in negative clinical events such hospitalization, intensive care admission or deaths. To gather their data, researchers followed more than two million commercially-insured patients and 250,000 Medicare insured patients.

OK, that's a large number of patients, but color me skeptical. I'd like to know how forcing poorer patients to decide on their own how sick they are could possibly have no impact on outcomes. Maybe the fact that Dr. Hsu is affiliated with Kaiser Permanente--a health plan which stands to make money if visits go down--has something to do with the result?

For more background on the research:
- read this Medical News Today article

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