Wait! How Much Was that Brain Surgery?

Rapidly rising medical costs will prompt health care providers and consumers to become more cost conscious, which will cause major changes in the provision of health care in the 1990s, a group of Harvard experts predicted yesterday at a symposium entitled "Health Care: Opportunities and Burdens for the '90s."

The panelists projected that for-profit hospitals will become increasingly popular and that consumers will have more control over how they pay for their health care.

The trend toward for-profit health care may result in the premature release of patients from the hospital as doctors attempt to cut costs, according to Mitchell T. Rabkin '51, the chief executive officer of the Harvard-affiliated Beth Israel Hospital.

Both government and society will turn toward pay-as-you-go health care, according to Charles Baker, a former deputy under secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Under the Medicare system currently in place, everyone in the country ends up subsidizing everyone else's care. "Now we want to pay for what we need and nothing more," Baker said.

"The government will attempt to pay less and less Medicare and will move away from regulating the industry," Baker said.

Catastrophic health insurance--which covers only major illnesses and accidents in exchange for low premiums--will become increasingly popular, according to McPherson Professor of Business Administration Regina E. Herzlinger.

"Young, healthy people will increasingly opt for health insurance that rewards them for being healthy," she said. "They are willing to take the gamble that they don't need low-end coverage."