BMJ  2006;332:314-315 (11 February), doi:10.1136/bmj.332.7537.314

Editorial

President Bush's proposals for healthcare reform

New plan offers "consumer empowerment" through rationing by socioeconomic class

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

In his State of the Union address last week, President Bush blessed the latest thing in American health policy: "consumer directed health care," also widely and inaccurately known by the acronym HSAs, which stands for "health savings accounts."¹ The idea is to "empower" "consumers" (formerly "patients") to function as agents of both quality control and cost control in health care, through two instruments.

Americans would be enticed into private health insurance with very high annual "deductibles"—out of pocket payments before insurance kicks in, from $2100 to $10 000 or more per family. In the words of Alan B Hubbard, director of the White House National Economic Council, the idea is to provide "people an opportunity... to have more skin in the game."² And Americans would be empowered with user friendly information on the cost and quality of the health services offered by individual doctors and hospitals—an ambitious vision that, . . . [Full text of this article]

Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544-1013, USA
(reinhard@princeton.edu)

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Rapid Responses:

Read all Rapid Responses

Equity and consumer directed healthcare

Leonardo Simonella
bmj.com, 13 Feb 2006 [Full text]

HSA

Thomas E Benzoni
bmj.com, 25 Feb 2006 [Full text]