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Workplace Wellness Programs Study: RAND Corporation Research Report Prepared for DOL and HHS (PDF)

165 pages. Excerpt: "[E]mployers overwhelmingly expressed confidence that workplace wellness programs reduce medical cost, absenteeism, and health-related productivity losses. But ... only about half stated that they have evaluated program impacts formally and only 2 percent reported actual savings estimates.... [S]tatistical analyses suggest that participation in a wellness program over five years is associated with a trend toward lower health care costs and decreasing health care use. We estimate the average annual difference to be $157, but the change is not statistically significant.... Well-executed programs appear to improve employee health meaningfully, whereas significant reductions in health care cost may take time to materialize.... Although participation incentives appear to be effective, intended and unintended effects of incentives for health-related standards need to be studied further."

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Key Findings from RAND Health Care Research on Telehealth Policy

"About 30 percent of patients used video telehealth services in the first months of the pandemic ... Survey data collected later in the pandemic showed that willingness to try telehealth among respondents ... significantly increased, relative to February 2019 ... Psychiatrists interviewed in the summer of 2021 felt that almost all their patients would be good candidates for receiving care through televisits as part of hybrid care, given some essentials, such as access to private space."

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Follow the (Health Insurance Lobby's) Money to RAND and the COMPARE Tool

Excerpt: In the race to influence health care reform, the insurance industry and major corporations just made a big score in the toy department. RAND Corp.... announced a new online 'analytic tool' of health reform proposals for 'policymakers and interested parties.' It leans hard toward having individuals pay for their own private insurance. It and completely omits a true public insurance choice like opening Medicare to all, much less any kind of single-payer plan. It's all free-market, all the time.

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RAND Creates First National Report Card on Quality of Health Care in America

Excerpt: Elizabeth McGlynn led a team of experts in the largest and most comprehensive examination ever conducted of health care quality in the United States. Called the Community Quality Index Study, it assessed the extent to which recommended care was provided to a representative sample of the U.S. population for a broad range of conditions in 12 metropolitan areas.  MORE >>

Rand: Cost Sharing Cuts Employers' Drug Spending -- But Employees Don't Get the Savings

Do increased patient cost sharing and formulary restrictions reduce pharmaceutical use and costs? To answer this question, a RAND team ... examined more than 700,000 person-years of data on beneficiaries enrolled in health plans from 25 private employers.... The study's key findings: Increasing co-payments causes consumers to use less medication and less-expensive drugs. Higher co-payments do cut costs, but [m]ost of the savings go to health insurance plans, not to consumers.  MORE >>

RAND Shrugged: What to Make of Its Report on the Effectiveness of Workplace Wellness Programs

"For critics of health-contingent workplace wellness programs, the conclusion is much more straightforward: even using prejudicial data sources and lacking a critique of the quality of the evidence, the impact of workplace wellness on the actual health of employees and the corporate medical care cost burden, is, generously stated, negligible. This is not worth $6BN a year, which is the purported size of the US market for health-contingent workplace wellness programs[.]"  MORE >>

Sen. Rand Paul Introduces Bill to Expand Health Care Freedom for the Self-Employed and Small Businesses

"The Association Health Plans Act of 2025 [S 1847] amends the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) to give small business employees, sole proprietors, and gig workers the ability to aggregate together and access health insurance through large-group Association Health Plans (AHPs).... The bill requires participating associations to have existed for at least two years and to serve a broader purpose than providing health benefits"  MORE >>

Rand Paul Says New Obamacare Repeal Talk 'Helpful,' But Needs More Time

"Multiple reports surfaced Monday that the White House and conservatives are discussing a compromise to grant [HHS] Secretary Tom Price more authority to allow states to waive certain Obamacare regulations that conservatives want repealed. [Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.)], leaving a meeting with House Freedom Caucus members in his office, confirmed that such discussions are in the works, and he indicated he had a conversation along those lines on Sunday, when he golfed with President Trump."

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RAND Study Says 'Workplace Wellness' Fails Bottom Line, Waistlines

"According to a report by researchers at the RAND Corp, programs that try to get employees to become healthier and reduce medical costs have only a modest effect.... The report found, for instance, that people who participate in such programs lose an average of only one pound a year for three years. In addition, participation 'was not associated with significant reductions in total cholesterol level.' And while there is some evidence that smoking-cessation programs work, they do so only 'in the short term.'"  MORE >>

RAND Study of Effect of ACA on Enrollment and Premiums, Either With or Without the Individual Mandate (PDF)

The authors predict the effects of a possible Supreme Court decision invalidating the individual mandate while keeping the other parts of the law intact. They predict the effects of such a decision on health insurance coverage overall and for subgroups based on income. They also estimate where people will obtain insurance in scenarios with and without the mandate. Finally, they estimate how the elimination of the individual mandate will affect insurance premiums.  MORE >>

RAND Creates 'COMPARE' Website Assessing Healthcare Reform Options

Excerpt: COMPARE is a transparent, evidence-based approach to providing information and tools to help policymakers, the media, and other interested parties understand, design, and evaluate health policies.  MORE >>

RAND Testimony on Health Insurance Market Rating Practices (PDF)

7 pages. Testimony presented before the Senate Finance Committee on September 23, 2008  MORE >>

Financial Literacy and Retirement Planning: New Evidence from the Rand American Life Panel (PDF)

Excerpt: The present paper introduces a new dataset, the Rand American Life Panel (ALP), which offers several appealing features for an analysis of financial literacy and retirement planning. It allows us to evaluate financial knowledge during workers' prime earning years when they are making key financial decisions, and it offers detailed financial literacy and retirement planning questions, permitting a finer assessment of respondents' financial literacy than heretofore feasible. [Working paper 2007-157]  MORE >>

For 25 Years, the RAND Health Insurance Experiment Has Stoked Competing Claims

Excerpt: Completed in 1982, the RAND Health Insurance Experiment stands out as the only long-term, experimental study of cost sharing and its effects on medical service use, quality of care, and health. It is possible to take two contrasting perspectives on the lessons of the experiment with respect to today's health care debate, in which the notion of cost sharing, or shifting a greater share of health care expense onto consumers, has returned to prominence.

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The Health Insurance Experiment: A Classic RAND Study & the Current Health Care Reform Debate (PDF)

7 pages. Excerpt: The purpose of this research brief is to summarize the [landmark RAND study: the Health Insurance Experiment's (HIE)] main findings and clarify its relevance for today's debate. Our goal is not to conclude that cost sharing is good or bad but to illuminate its effects so that policymakers can use the information to make sound decisions.  MORE >>

The Role of Consumer Copayments for Health Care: Lessons from RAND Health Insurance Experiment (PDF)

18 pages. Excerpt: The appropriate level of cost sharing for patients remains a key issue in designing both private and public health insurance. A new report ... by the Kaiser Family Foundation reviews the landmark RAND Health Insurance Experiment from the 1970s to offer insights into current policy debates about appropriate cost-sharing levels.  MORE >>

Rand Paul Introduces Healthcare Freedom Legislation

"The Health Marketplace for All Act of 2024 [S 5298] would allow any membership organization -- which includes wholesale clubs (such as Costco), credit unions, and churches, among others -- to offer an ERISA health plan to its members 'across state lines -- regardless of an employment relationship.'... The Health Savings Account for All Act [S 5297] would give millions of Americans access to a health savings account (HSA) regardless of income or insurance coverage so that patients can take advantage of the tax-free growth and withdrawals when spending on qualifying healthcare services."  MORE >>

Sen. Rand Paul on Paul Ryan's 'Obamacare Lite'

"[Sen. Paul] said there are four major reasons that Ryan's bill is wrong; specifically that it creates an entitlement program, that it does not effectively handle Obamacare taxes and even keeps the Cadillac Tax indefinitely, the keeping of Obamacare's individual mandate, and the keeping of Obamacare's risk corridors -- but simply renaming them."  MORE >>

What Does RAND Health Insurance Experiment Tell Us About Impact of Patient Cost Sharing on Health Outcomes? (PDF)

3 pages. Excerpt: Most importantly, we believe it is possible to reduce the adverse consequences of cost sharing by adopting the principles of value-based insurance design (VBID), which argues that copayments or cost sharing more generally should be kept low for high-value healthcare services.  MORE >>

Text of Decision by Appeals Court in the Case of Drutis, et al. v. Rand McNally and Co. (PDF)

8 pages.

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