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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."

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."

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.

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.

Website: Financial Literacy Center

Excerpt: The mission of the Financial Literacy Center is to develop and test innovative programs to improve financial literacy and promote informed financial decision-making. With support from the Social Security Administration, the Center was established in October 2009 by the RAND Corporation, Dartmouth College, and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in order to develop educational tools and programs that help individuals prepare for their long-term financial stability.

Investor Testing of Form CRS Relationship Summary (PDF)

122 pages. "RAND researchers designed and fielded the survey ... to collect information on the opinions, preferences, attitudes, and level of self-assessed comprehension of the U.S. adult population with regard to a sample Relationship Summary.... [T]he RAND team also conducted qualitative interviews to obtain further insights related to the reasoning and beliefs behind individuals' attitudes toward the Relationship Summary. This report presents the results of those data collection efforts.... [T]he most common recommendation for each section is to keep the length 'as is,' ranging from 43 percent to 62 percent of respondents."

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.

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[.]"

Prescription Drug Prices, Rebates, and Insurance Premiums (PDF)

142 pages. "To help inform ASPE's report, a RAND team Section examined U.S. trends in prescription drug coverage, prices, and spending Section summarized extant evidence on associations between drug spending and premiums Section to the extent feasible, conducted illustrative analyses using 2020 and 2021 [Prescription Drug Data Collection (RxDC)] data. In this report, the authors share their findings from their analysis and recommendations to the government to address limitations of the RxDC data."

Can the Cadillac Tax Be Made Less Regressive by Replacing It with an Exclusion Cap?

"One alternative to the Cadillac tax is an 'exclusion cap,' under which individuals enrolled in employer-sponsored plans would be able to exclude premiums from their taxable income only up to a dollar limit (i.e., the cap). This analysis uses RAND's COMPARE microsimulation model to [1] define an exclusion cap scenario that would produce the same amount of federal tax revenues as the Cadillac tax in 2020 and [2] compare the effects of the exclusion cap and the Cadillac tax on families in different income ranges. The analysis shows that there is very little difference in progressivity between the Cadillac tax and a revenue-equivalent exclusion cap."