Last week I wrote about Humana’s YouTube videos designed to “explain” parts of the healthcare system.  Well they just put another one titled, “Some Doctors Cost More. Why?”

Two interesting points about this video: First, at the beginning they describe  insurance companies (like Humana) as “Providers.” (The narration uses the term “health coverage providers,” but the graphic shows “PROVIDER.”)

While physicians and other clinicians really dislike being called providers, I think they wouldn’t want to see that term used for insurance companies either, since it implies that the insurance company is actually providing healthcare.  (I usually reserve the term provider to describe broad groupings of clinical entities, such as, “providers of oncology care in the Chicago area,” - which would include physicians, nurses, hospitals, etc…)

And second, the title and content of the video doesn’t focus on the total costs of care or services provided by individual physicians, but mostly only patients’ co-pays - which are lower when they use the physicians that are in-network for their insurance plan.

And as the video’s tag line says, “Now you know.”

This entry was posted on Monday, November 17th, 2008 at 12:44 pm and is filed under Clinician-Patient Relationships, Economics & Financing, Information & Communications, Miscellaneous, Private-Employer Based Health Insurance. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.