Unhealthy Consumer Research Articles

Psihološke implikacije Fukoovog panoptikona u današnjem društvu

The author of the paper explains Foucault's basic ideas related to the use of panopticon in public institutions and society, with the aim to control and impose identity, in order to accomplish the interests of centres of power. The aim of this paper is to explain the ways in which panopticon operate in today's society, through procedures of supervision and punishment. The author tries to apply Foucault's initial ideas to today's reality and explain the way in which the panopticon functions by forcing certain points of view in science which validity has not been empirically confirmed, forming a consumer society through imposed identities. The application of panopticon is based on the fear of people that they will be excluded from society and lose their positions, if they do not follow the roles imposed on them. They very easily give up their own identity for the sake of existential security and social status. The task of those scientists, psychologists and psychiatrists who have decided not to serve the interests of the centres of power is to be as clear and effective as possible, pointing out all the factors that lead to the formation of an unhealthy consumer society, as well as the mechanisms of their action.

Responsibility Considerations and the Design of Health Care Policies: A Survey Study of the Norwegian Population.

The objective of this article is to explore people's attitudes toward responsibility in the allocation of public health care resources. Special attention is paid to conceptualizations of responsibility involving blame and sanctions. A representative sample of the Norwegian population was asked about various responsibility mechanisms that have been proposed in the theoretical literature on health care and personal responsibility, from denial of treatment to a tax on unhealthy consumer goods. Survey experiments were employed to study treatment effects, such as whether fairness considerations affect attitudes about responsibility. We find that, overall, a substantial minority of the respondents find it fair to let the health care system sanction people-in one way or another-for voluntary behaviors that increase the risk of becoming ill. Quite surprisingly, we find that people are more prone to report that they should themselves be held responsible for unhealthy lifestyles than others.

Healthy Food Choice in Thailand: An Investigation into Illness Knowledge and Sociodemographics

You are what you eat. Food choices have been found to have effects on people and their diseases. Given plain taste, healthy food choices are less popular. This study aimed to investigate relevant factors of healthy food-choice decisions among healthy and unhealthy consumers. We examined the impact of awareness of health conditions (illness knowledge) and sociodemographics on food-consumption behavior using logistic regression models. Empirical results showed that consumers place taste as the key determinant when making food-consumption decisions. Men are more inclined towards unhealthy food choices than women. Ageing helps sway consumers to eat more plain food. Illness knowledge influences consumer preferences towards a healthier option, the plain taste food. However, illness knowledge has less influence on educated consumers and older consumers who exhibit strong fixation on tasty food preference. Education helps consumers form healthy food preferences rather than alters existing preferences towards healthy food choices. In promoting healthy food choices, awareness of health status becomes a vital factor. Health checkup campaign is therefore encouraged, supporting consumers to wisely consider healthier food choices.

Advertising and Risk Selection in Health Insurance Markets

This paper studies the impact of advertising as a channel for risk selection in Medicare Advantage. We provide evidence that insurer advertising is responsive to the gains from risk selection. Then we develop and estimate an equilibrium model of Medicare Advantage with advertising, allowing rich individual heterogeneity. Our estimates show that advertising is effective in attracting healthy individuals who are newly eligible for Medicare, contributing to advantageous selection into Medicare Advantage. Moreover, risk selection through advertising substantially lowers premiums by improving insurers' risk pools. The distributional implication is that unhealthy consumers may be better off through cross-subsidization from healthy individuals.

Incidental rewarding cues influence economic decisions in people with obesity.

Recent research suggests that obesity is linked to prominent alterations in learning and decision-making. This general difference may also underlie the preference for immediately consumable, highly palatable but unhealthy and high-calorie foods. Such poor food-related inter-temporal decision-making can explain weight gain; however, it is not yet clear whether this deficit can be generalized to other domains of inter-temporal decision-making, for example financial decisions. Further, little is known about the stability of decision-making behavior in obesity, especially in the presence of rewarding cues. To answer these questions, obese and lean participants (n = 52) completed two sessions of a novel priming paradigm including a computerized monetary delay discounting task. In the first session, general differences between groups in financial delay discounting were measured. In the second session, we tested the general stability of discount rates. Additionally, participants were primed by affective visual cues of different contextual categories before making financial decisions. We found that the obese group showed stronger discounting of future monetary rewards than the lean group, but groups did not differ in their general stability between sessions nor in their sensitivity toward changes in reward magnitude. In the obese group, a fast decrease of subjective value over time was directly related to a higher tendency for opportunistic eating. Obese in contrast to lean people were primed by the affective cues, showing a sex-specific pattern of priming direction. Our findings demonstrate that environments rich of cues, aiming at inducing unhealthy consumer decisions, can be highly detrimental for obese people. It also underscores that obesity is not merely a medical condition but has a strong cognitive component, meaning that current dietary and medical treatment strategies may fall too short.

Switching rates in health insurance markets decrease with age: empirical evidence and policy implications from the Netherlands.

All consumer groups with specific preferences must feel free to easily switch insurer in order to discipline insurers to be responsive to consumers' heterogeneous preferences. This paper provides insight into the switching behaviour of low-risks (i.e. young or healthy consumers) and high-risks (i.e. elderly or unhealthy consumers) in the Netherlands in the period 2009-2012. We analysed: (1) administrative data with objective health status information (i.e. medically diagnosed diseases and pharmaceutical use) and information on health care expenses of nearly the entire Dutch population (n=15.3 million individuals) and (2) three-year sample data (n=1152 individuals). Our findings indicate that switching rates strongly decrease with age. For example, in 2009, consumers aged 25-44 switched 10 times more than consumers aged 75 or older. Another finding is that switching rates decrease as the predicted health care expenses increase. Although healthy consumers switch twice as much as unhealthy consumers, this difference becomes much smaller after adjusting for age. We conclude that our findings can be explained by higher perceived switching costs by elderly consumers than by young consumers. Consequently, insurers have low incentives to act as quality-conscious purchasers of care for the elderly consumers. Therefore, strategies should be developed to increase the choice of insurer of elderly consumers.

The Perils of Marketing Weight-Management Remedies and the Role of Health Literacy

This research explores the impact of weight-management remedy marketing on healthy lifestyle behaviors. Three studies demonstrate that exposure to drug (but not supplement) marketing for weight management encourages unhealthy consumer behavior as a result of consumers' reliance on erroneous beliefs about health remedies. The authors explore the possible mitigating role of two dimensions of healthy literacy: nutrition knowledge and remedy knowledge. Whether measured or manipulated, the results show remedy knowledge to be more effective than nutrition knowledge at lessening the effect of weight-management drug marketing on unhealthy behavior. The authors close with a discussion of the theoretical and substantive implications of this research for consumer welfare.

When Companies Do Good, Are Their Products Good for You? How Corporate Social Responsibility Creates a Health Halo

Research has demonstrated that consumers frequently engage in inference making when evaluating food products. These inferences can be highly inaccurate, leading to unintended, unhealthy consumer choices. Previous research has examined the role of inference making in consumption settings from either an inter- or intra-attribute perspective. The current research highlights extra-attribute inferences, in which consumers use corporate-level information to make inferences about product-level attributes. Across four studies, the authors demonstrate the existence of a health halo resulting from corporate social responsibility activities. When consumers evaluate food products marketed by firms with strong corporate social responsibility reputations, they underestimate the calorie content. Furthermore, the authors show that this calorie underestimation can lead to overconsumption by consumers.

Switching benefits and costs in competitive health insurance markets: A conceptual framework and empirical evidence from the Netherlands

Competitive health insurance markets will only enhance cost-containment, efficiency, quality, and consumer responsiveness if all consumers feel free to easily switch insurer. Consumers will switch insurer if their perceived switching benefits outweigh their perceived switching costs. We developed a conceptual framework with potential switching benefits and costs in competitive health insurance markets. Moreover, we used a questionnaire among Dutch consumers (1091 respondents) to empirically examine the relevance of the different switching benefits and costs in consumers’ decision to (not) switch insurer. Price, insurers’ service quality, insurers’ contracted provider network, the benefits of supplementary insurance, and welcome gifts are potential switching benefits. Transaction costs, learning costs, ‘benefit loss’ costs, uncertainty costs, the costs of (not) switching provider, and sunk costs are potential switching costs. In 2013 most Dutch consumers switched insurer because of (1) price and (2) benefits of supplementary insurance. Nearly half of the non-switchers – and particularly unhealthy consumers – mentioned one of the switching costs as their main reason for not switching. Because unhealthy consumers feel not free to easily switch insurer, insurers have reduced incentives to invest in high-quality care for them. Therefore, policymakers should develop strategies to increase consumer choice.

Consumer empowerment versus consumer populism in healthcare IT

Institutions, providers, and informaticians now encourage healthcare consumers to take greater control of their own healthcare needs through improved health and wellness activities, internet-based education and support groups, and personal health records. The author believes that "untethering" all of these activities from provider-based record systems has introduced a form of unhealthy consumer populism. Conversely, integrating these activities in a coordinated manner can sustain both consumer empowerment and consumer well-being.

Food industry and health: mostly promises, little action

Food-policy analysts at City University, London, UK, recently fired off another salvo in the food wars with an exhaustive—and depressing—report on what food companies are doing to address obesity, improve the nutritional quality of their products, and market products more responsibly. Not much, write Tim Lang and colleagues. 1 Lang T Rayner G Kaelin E The food industry, diet, physical activity and health: a review of reported commitments and practice of 25 of the world's largest food companies. http://www.city.ac.uk/press/The%20Food%20Industry%20Diet%20Physical%20Activity%20and%20Health.pdfDate: April, 2006 Google Scholar According to them, giant food corporations publicly state that they bear some responsibility for health (table), but most do not seem to meet this responsibility. The majority of food companies, the report concludes, “are not yet fully engaged with the seriousness and urgency” of today's health challenges. Indeed, “in failing fully to respond…companies appear to be distancing themselves from their responsibility for unhealthy consumer choices.” 1 Lang T Rayner G Kaelin E The food industry, diet, physical activity and health: a review of reported commitments and practice of 25 of the world's largest food companies. http://www.city.ac.uk/press/The%20Food%20Industry%20Diet%20Physical%20Activity%20and%20Health.pdfDate: April, 2006 Google Scholar TableStatements by leading food companies about corporate responsibility for health of consumers Company Sales (US$ billion) Advertising (US$$ billion) Statements Coca-Cola (USA) 21 2·2 The company exists to benefit and refresh everyone it touches. ConAgra (USA) 14·5 .. We touch the lives of many, many people. This brings with it a special sense of responsibility, one we take to heart. Danone (France) 18 1·2 * US$ converted from Euros in original report. Helps people around the world grow, live better and get more out of life through tastier, more varied and healthier food products—every day. Kraft (USA) 32 1·6 Our vision is about meeting consumers' needs and making food an easier, healthier, more enjoyable part of life. PepsiCo (USA) 29·3 1·7 Our health and wellness initiatives…strengthen our commitment to contribute to the well-being of our consumers. Unilever (UK, 29·7 * US$ converted from Euros in original report. 7·2 (includes We meet everyday needs for nutrition, hygiene and Netherlands) non-food) * US$ converted from Euros in original report. personal care with brands that help people feel good, look good and get more out of life. Ahold (Netherlands) 65·8 * US$ converted from Euros in original report. 0·456 * US$ converted from Euros in original report. As we see the focus on health and well-being to be a major, sustained consumer trend, we want to be a leader in this area, or even have a genuine impact on the overweight/obesity issue going forward. Carrefour (France) 12·1 * US$ converted from Euros in original report. .. Aims to set the benchmark in modern retailing for the protection of health, consumer safety and the environment. Kroger (USA) 51·1 0·667 * US$ converted from Euros in original report. Our mission is to be a leader in the distribution and merchandising of food, health, personal care and related consumable products and services. McDonald's (USA) 51·3 (includes franchises) 0·723 McDonald's cares about the well-being issues that are so important to many of our customers. All figures are from 1 Lang T Rayner G Kaelin E The food industry, diet, physical activity and health: a review of reported commitments and practice of 25 of the world's largest food companies. http://www.city.ac.uk/press/The%20Food%20Industry%20Diet%20Physical%20Activity%20and%20Health.pdfDate: April, 2006 Google Scholar for 2002–04. * US$ converted from Euros in original report. Open table in a new tab All figures are from 1 Lang T Rayner G Kaelin E The food industry, diet, physical activity and health: a review of reported commitments and practice of 25 of the world's largest food companies. http://www.city.ac.uk/press/The%20Food%20Industry%20Diet%20Physical%20Activity%20and%20Health.pdfDate: April, 2006 Google Scholar for 2002–04.

Insurance Regulation Could Do More Harm Than Good

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Health Care EconomicsFull AccessInsurance Regulation Could Do More Harm Than GoodMark MoranMark MoranSearch for more papers by this authorPublished Online:7 May 2004https://doi.org/10.1176/pn.39.9.0023Regulation of health insurance premiums alone is not likely to stem rising costs if efforts are not made to address the root causes of health care inflation: ever-expanding medical technology in the face of limited resources to pay for it.In the absence of such efforts, merely capping insurance premiums is likely to have a number of unintended negative consequences.That is the conclusion from an analysis by the California HealthCare Foundation of a proposal in California that would have required premium increases to be approved by the state.Under the Health Insurance Cost Control Legislation (SB 26) introduced in 2003, health plans would have been required to reimburse policyholders with interest for premium increases imposed between April 1, 2000, and January 1, 2004, unless the increases were approved retroactively by the Department of Insurance or the Department of Managed Health Care.The bill did not pass out of committee last year, but rising health care costs and increasing profits for some health plans have fueled a movement in the state for premium regulation.“Private HMO and health insurance premiums in California are soaring,” according to a statement supporting SB 26 last year by the California Health Consensus, a coalition of physicians and others who favor universal health care. “Small businesses have seen their premiums escalate close to 20 percent each year for three years. Concurrently, some HMOs and insurers are enjoying double- and triple-digit profit increases, have amassed cash reserves not counted as profit but that are $2.2 billion above the guidelines adopted by the Department of Managed Health Care (DHMC), and spend up to 33 cents of every health care dollar not on care but on administration, salaries, and advertising.”However, in a recent report titled “Should California Regulate Health Insurance Premiums?,” the California Health Care Foundation states that premium regulation would do little to address the root causes of inflation of health care costs. And if health care costs continue to rise while premiums are frozen, several negative consequences would likely ensue. According to the foundation, they include the following:• In the short term, insurers could balance their losses by reducing the quality or quantity of care—or both.• Insurers could discourage unhealthy consumers from enrolling in plans, thus increasing the number of uninsured over time.• Insurers may exit the market entirely.• Over the longer term, regulation could discourage expensive treatments and technologies, no matter how beneficial, from coming to market.On the plus side, the foundation noted that a desirable related consequence is that premium regulation could motivate the introduction of cost-saving technologies.“We’ve determined that SB 26 would limit premium growth in the short run,” said Neeraj Sood, associate economist at RAND and lead author of the report. “However, without modification, it would do little to cure the root causes of health care inflation.”The other authors of the report were Abby Alpert, research assistant at RAND; Dana Goldman, Ph.D., director of health economics at RAND; and Mary Vaina, director of communications at RAND.The California HealthCare Foundation is an independent, nonprofit organization that commissions research and analysis, publishes and disseminates information, convenes stakeholders, and funds development of programs and models aimed at improving the health care delivery and financing systems. The foundation focuses on four areas of health care: chronic disease care, hospital care, health insurance, and public financing and policy.“Clearly, the issue of rising costs is a critical one that everyone is wrestling with in the health insurance business,” Marian Mulkey, project director for the California Health Care Foundation, told Psychiatric News.She said the root causes of health care inflation have to do with continual expansion of what medicine can do for people in spite of limited resources to pay for those advances.“We have all seen great advances in the types of care being offered, technology being used, and pharmaceuticals being marketed,” she said. “All these contribute to cost, as well as to quality and better outcome. The lesson for physicians is that there really aren’t easy solutions. Something simple like drawing a line on premiums doesn’t appear to be the solution.”“Should California Regulate Health Insurance Premiums?” is posted online at www.chcf.org/documents/insurance/ShouldCARegulateHealthInsurancePremiums.pdf. ▪ ISSUES NewArchived

Consumer Demand for Guaranteed Renewability in Health Insurance

This paper addresses the following question: Why do consumers demand guaranteed renewability in health insurance? The answer to this question has important implications for the ability of competitive health insurance markets to provide affordable health insurance for people with chronic illness. The approach is novel. Empirical studies show that guaranteed renewability exists in health and life insurance. In the health insurance setting, these findings imply that consumers' preferences for low premiums and quality do not depend on their health status. Then consumer preference data collected from a survey of approximately 1,000 single employees in 19 Minneapolis-area companies are examined to determine if healthy and unhealthy consumers have similar preferences for low premiums and quality. It is found that employees' preference ratings for the importance of low premiums and aspects of provider and service quality are not related to their health status. These findings imply that health-related diversity of preferences is not likely to cause the employees in this study to select different health insurance plans. However, there is evidence of diverse preferences related to employee demographics such as income, education, and gender.