Wednesday, June 4, 2008

Will Consumers Union Find a Place for ... Consumers?

By Merrill Matthews, Jr.

Several years ago I was asked to speak about Medical Savings Accounts (now Health Savings Accounts, or HSAs) as a panelist at an Alliance for Health Reform event. The Alliance is a bi-partisan, congressionally created program charged with looking into health policy issues and reforms.

I noticed from the RSVP list that a lot of Consumers Union (CU) people would be there. Now, Consumers Union has, for years, been a proponent of a huge government-run health care system. And a constant critic of any consumer driven health care reform initiatives, like HSAs.

So I took time in my speech and directly addressed the CU people. I said that the organization's whole existence is based on the notion that informed consumers can make good decisions. That's what "Consumer Reports" is all about, I said. So why, I wondered, was the organization so convinced that informed patients couldn't make good decisions?

Well, I got no answer . . . until now. Consumers Union will launch a hospital ratings service that will evaluate some 3,000 hospitals nationwide. I don't know the specifics, so I won't comment on how good the system will be. But it's exactly what one would expect to happen in a consumer driven health care world.

The sad thing is that it took CU -- which has "consumer" in its name, no less -- so many years to do what should have been a natural fit for it all along.