By Jan Greene
The folks at Consumers Union, who publish Consumer Reports Health, have taken their show on the road this summer to bring attention to the many and varied flaws in the U.S. healthcare system. You can track their progress on their Cover America Tour site. Ultimately, the three young campaigners in an RV-shtick is part of Consumers Union’s healthcare reform lobbying, preparation for when a new president shows up in the White House, possibly ready to make some major changes.
Meanwhile, Consumer Reports Health has done some work of interest to consumers with inadequate coverage. For instance, the article 7 ways to make the most of your health plan has some solid advice for people with insurance. Most valuable is a form they’ve created (the link is in the “7 ways” article) that makes it easy to analyze your health plan’s benefits; there’s also a list of questions to ask about your health plan.
The Consumer Reports Health website has a lot of information open to non-subscribers, which is nice. One feature is a hospital comparison tool that is based on research about how care differs from one region of the country to another, and from one hospital to another. So I plugged in my area, which is Alameda County, California, and found a wide range of “aggressiveness” in care by the eight hospitals that popped up, along with average doctor fees. This refers to whether the doctors are conservative in carrying out expensive tests and procedures or whether they go all-out. Research is showing that more care is not necessarily better, and that sometimes unnecessary testing can be bad for us. Still, if I was going into the hospital for an operation I’m not sure I could bring myself to choose the conservative hospital, for fear that they’d hold back something I’d need. That’s not likely if I choose physicians who are experienced and I trust. In any event, the CRH hospital comparison tool is probably not something you’d depend on for a choice, but it’s one more thing to consider. And good for Consumer Reports for expanding the universe of information available to consumers.