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Rhoads, J. "Insurance Companies Should Pay Patients When They Make Cost-Effective Choices" Center for Modern Health. February 2026.

The American health care system suffers from many misalignments of incentives, but one is particularly irksome: When individual patients make prudent decisions about their care, choosing reasonable but less costly alternatives, they capture none of the savings they generate.

This disconnect between individual choice and individual benefit represents not merely an economic inefficiency but a philosophical failure to respect the rational agency of health care consumers. When a patient makes a prudent health care decision, the financial benefit shouldn’t redound to someone else, or the group as a whole. It should redound to the person who made the choice.

Consider the example of a 45-year-old man who sees his doctor for an annual physical and learns that he is now eligible for colorectal cancer screening. His physician explains that there are several evidence-based options, including a colonoscopy and the fecal immunochemical test, or FIT, which is administered at home and then mailed to a laboratory for analysis. The patient in this case has insurance, so the out-of-pocket difference between the two options for the patient is essentially zero, even though behind the scenes, the cost of colonoscopy is about $2,750 versus about $50 for the FIT.

Read the full article at STAT First Opinion...

Jared Rhoads is Executive Director of the Center for Modern Health.