Every year at about this time (since the late 1990s), Harris Interactive conducts a poll in which they ask consumers whether they think specific industries are doing a good job (or not). The results of the 2008 poll were just published.
These polls have always included data on four health care-related industries, as follows:
- Hospitals
- Health insurance companies
- Managed care companies (including HMOs)
- Pharmaceutical/drug companies
So I thought it might be educational to look back over the past decade and see exactly how consumer perceptions of these industries had changed over time compared to some of the other industries that have also been been tracked by Harris over the same timeframe.
The results can be seen if you click on the little image on the right. This graph shows a plot of the differences between “doing a good job” and “doing a bad job” for each industry itemized. So, for example, in 2008 (somewhat to my surprise) 67 percent of consumers thought car manufacturers were doing a good job and only 30 percent thought they were doing a bad job, for a positive score of +37 percent.
So how have the four itemized elements of the health care industry done over the past decade?
When you consider that people die in them all the time, and there is a never-ending stream of media stories about people getting the wrong drugs or having the wrong limb amputated, hospitals (indicated by the bold red line) have done pretty well over the years, with a pretty steady good job/bad job rating of around +50 percent.
On the other hand, both health insurance and the managed care (the bold blue and bold orange lines respectively) are industries we seem to “love to hate” regardless of whether they are doing a good job or not. Only once in the past decade has either one of these industries managed to get onto the positive side of the equation since the end of the 1990s. One is tempted to wonder if there is anything they could do to change this perception. Only tobacco companies have had a persistency worse rating over the past 10 years!
The pharmaceutical/drug industry (the bold white line), by comparison with managed care and health insurance, is managing to do pretty well. Only in 2004 did it slide into negative numbers. However, over the 10-year period there has been a significant drop in its good job/bad job rating, from +50 in 1998 (about the same as hospitals) to +15 this year.
Now all sorts of different things influence these rankings, and we shouldn’t try to carry out any sort of detailed perception analysis based on these numbers, but the decline in the reputation of the pharmaceutical industry over the past 10 years compared to the stability of the reputation of the hospital industry tells me that we are now seen to be more like the MCOs and the health insurance industries. Consumers believe we are focused first and foremost on our profitability, with the health care needs of consumers an increasingly distant second.
Don’t shoot the messenger … I’m just reporting the data folks!
Filed under: Business strategy, Health and drug costs | Tagged: reputation industry consumer Harris attitudes
