Are these kids really $5.8 billion dollars sicker?

Remember “7^th Heaven”, and “Married With Children”?

 

I mention these two shows because of the difference between the parents and how they dealt with the kids. The 7^th Heaven parents were clearly devoted to the health and welfare of the kids. Kelly and Bud Bundy were—well—pretty much on their own!

 

So, here’s the point. In an examination of 2,201 health plan enrollees from 2005 with dependent claims, levels of agreement with the statement: “Members of my family take care of their own health” identified a spread of nearly $2.4 million dollars between those who strongly agree (like Al and Peggy Bundy) and those who strongly disagree with the statement (like Mr. and Mrs. Camden). This level of variance did not come from the dollar amount of actual claims, but from differences in the frequency of how often claims occurred. For example, those members who strongly agree with the statement (n=1,624) accounted for only 8.6% of total dependent claims, while those who disagreed with the statement (n=1,742) accounted for 34.7%. The total dollar amounts associated with each group were $741,380 and $3,091,144, respectively. The rate of dependent claims generation within the populations was also dramatically different: for the agreement group it was 11.6% per year; for the disagreement group it was 43.8% per year. For the statistical bozos out there like me, the “p” values (not to be confused with the value normally associated with urine) were all significant at the p<0.0000001 level. Yeah, this is for real!

 

This huge difference in dependent claims may be the result of many different factors, including the number of children per group, the age of the children in each group, the age of the parents in each group, or the priority of dependent’s health per group. Whatever the associated factors might be, the fact is that the assessment of one cognitive dimension identified millions of dollars of difference in demand for health care services among a relatively small sample of health plan members. These demand levels need to be verified by more similar studies of course. But assuming this kind of claims variation holds within the US population of parents, the projected spread in dependent claims levels associated with the varying priority of family health is about $5.8 billion dollars a year.

 

I’ll bet a handful of guitar picks that the dollar difference between these two groups is not because the parents who disagree with the statement just happen to have kids who are $5.8 billion dollars sicker!

Explore posts in the same categories: U.S. health care crisis

Tags: Add new tag, cognitive drivers of health, health care costs, health care spending on kids, Unnecessary health care spending

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