Heathcare: How an insurance company decides to pay for what

As many of you are aware, I've left the high tech sector and have moved to work for a Health Insurance company. Since my job is to analyze processes and improve them using Lean process improvement methodology, I have a pretty unique insight into the broader workings of my company - which will only grow as I expand Lean through more parts of the company. As a note, these views are my own and do not represent the views of Cambia Health in anyway. I believe that it's important to help educate the broader public about what happens when you want to have elective care or even while you've been admitted for care - either after an elective procedure or in an emergent case.

I know I'm opening a can of worms here, so I think it's important to note that these are truly caring individuals that want their members to receive the best care. However, they are also put into a tough position because health insurance is a contract and your employers negotiate types of care that will be paid for within your health insurance plan. Furthermore, as a way to control the amount of money the insurer pays they will "manage" the type of care that is being provided to a member. This of course is the part that people hate, my doctor says this should be done, so it should be paid for by insurance company! Well, yes and no.

In some cases your doctor may recommend a specific type of treatment that you actually need, but your insurance company won't pay for it! Why not? Well, there could be a few reasons. First, you may not actually have the benefit. For example many cosmetic procedures aren't covered and aren't part of your benefit package, or maybe you've already exhausted the benefit for instance number of days in a skilled nursing facility. Unfortunately, insurance premiums are based upon the amount of benefits that you could use and the total amount of risk that you are to the insurer. Which of course is difficult, because a person may need that care, but they didn't pay to have all of it fully covered. The other unfortunate portion is that most people truly don't understand what their benefits are, which makes this even more difficult. This of course goes back to Prospect Theory where insurance companies are acting as much more rational entities than their members, which leads to a definite imbalance of understanding and event potentially power in the relationship. Humans don't read all the contracts and Econs do - insurance companies are Econs extremely rational (in the economic sense) when dealing with contracts and risk.

The second case where an insurance company won't pay for a service relates to medical necessity. This is the part where providers get really upset with insurance companies. Essentially, this is a case where the insurance company is using a combination of medical research to create policies with criteria for procedures. So when you are trying to receive care, the Diagnosis is less important than the service that your provider selects for you. Diagnosis plays a larger role whenever the insurance company recommends alternative methods of care that lead to the same level of care but typically cost less - either to the member, insurance company, or both.

This requires the provider to submit clinical information to justify that procedure. Some of this requirement may actually drive up costs because the provider may have a great deal of intuitive experience with a specific type of diagnosis and knows that the best treatment is X. However, the insurance company requires that for procedure/treatment X that tests a, b, c must be run with results q, r, s. Based on the combination of the results the insurance company determines if that procedure is medically necessary or not. This works really well when there's very clear medical research and clear correlation between diagnosis and treatment. It doesn't work as well for less precise treatments such as behavioral health - which is much more trial and error and requires a lot of time.

Who creates the medical policies though? A combination of research clinicians, internal MDs, and providers - if they are insurance company specific policies. However, there are more general policies that are recognized and used for inpatient Medicare and Medicaid. These may have more input from the people using them. Policies take time to develop and typically lag the latest research. However, in many cases these policies may represent more knowledge about a specific treatment methodology than a general practitioner or even a specialist can know because of the breadth and depth of medical knowledge.

I will discuss more topics related to healthcare and how these impact costs over the next few weeks.