• by Rob Rebak , November 4, 2014

When was the last time you paid retail prices for anything? 

When you’re shopping for something, you probably start with search, look at a price comparison site, and search on bargain sites like Groupon for the best deal. Or you may not be shopping at all, but you get motivated to shop based on an offer you receive on one of your daily deal site subscriptions. (I admit, Gilt is my guilty pleasure.) While in the past there was the belief that price-off offers cheapened a brand, today it’s becoming the opposite: We’re smart enough to know that we don’t need to pay full price, and we are resourceful enough to know where to look for the right offers.

We’ve become trained to price-shop in our daily lives, and I believe that this is going to carry over to our healthcare buying very soon. Think about what influences our healthcare decisions today. There are supply-side factors, like doctors’ recommendation and the insurance coverage. But what a doctor recommends is becoming susceptible to what is covered by insurance. And what is covered is, under newer health plans, victim to high deductibles and high co-pays. Then there are demand-side factors, like my personal preference based on advertising I’ve consumed, research I’ve done or word-of-mouth. These are soon going to be supplemented with our new power to price-shop.

Someone I know recently had to have surgery. Her doctor wanted to do it at a specialty surgery center. Because this center did not accept her insurance, her out-of-pocket cost for the facility would have been $25,000. In contrast, her out-of-pocket cost at the hospital down the street (which was a reputable institution, one of the best in the country) that did take her insurance would have been $5,000, her deductible for the year. She price-shopped, then bargained with the specialty surgery center, which dropped their price to $5,000. An 80% reduction, just because she asked.

That is what we see emerging as the new consumerism in healthcare. To my pharma industry friends, this is much bigger than offering co-pay cards. Because although co-pay cards work in theory to give health consumers a price break they are looking for, the co-pay card search happens mostly after consumers have been convinced to select a brand. And the new consumer behavior is going to require pricing offers be integrated as a factor, lock, stock and barrel, during the selection process, not a step after.

But for argument’s sake, let’s say that we have a consumer who is already motivated to find a treatment for, say, their depression. They do a search for “depression treatment” and find unbranded links to brands like Pristiq and Brintellix alongside category education from sites like Mayo Clinic and drugs.com. If they search for “depression treatment co-pay card,” they get links to co-pay cards for Zoloft, Pristiq, Fetzima, Oleptro, Latuda, Abilify. The problem is, consumers don’t use terms like co-pay card when looking for a solution. This is just not language that consumers use. While over 18,000 searches are done monthly on Google alone for depression treatment, “depression treatment co-pay card” searches don’t even show up in Google Analytics. It’s just not part of consumer lexicon. 

If you are overweight, have depression and suffer from heartburn, wouldn’t it be great to receive daily offers on products and services that are customized to your profile? I propose that health consumers are hungry for an easy way to access price-based solutions for their health concerns, customized just for them, and offered in a way that mimics how they shop in general while being sensitive to they way they buy health services. 

Agencies and marketers: Think about changing the way you talk to this new price-aware, price-savvy consumer. 

I think I see a health-specific Groupon on the horizon!