Penny Shaffer, PhD, market president at Blue Cross Blue Shield subsidiary Florida Blue, said policyholders need to become better consumers when it comes to their healthcare spending.
“We have to bend that cost curve through education, better consumerism and understanding how better to use the benefits. If we all keep using it the way we’ve always used it, it’s unsustainable,” Ms. Shaffer told WLRN.
Ms. Shaffer said everyday life choices and healthcare trends account for a large part of the instability.
“I think a lot of it’s about our pattern of utilization,” she told WLRN. “First, it’s about the lifestyles that we’re leading. It’s about what we’ve chosen to do … and it comes back to the medical trends that we’re going to have to pay more attention to.”
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