As Demand For Healthcare Services Goes Up, Satisfaction Goes Down

This statement alone should scare anyone as you think about all the new consumers coming into the healthcare system.  That will only stress the system more leading me to believe we’ll see bigger drops in satisfaction in the years to come.  

This data is from the latest American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI).  You can see a blurb on them below along with the full ranking of different industries.  Not surprising, healthcare isn’t at the top, but let me highlight a few of the categories:

• Ambulatory Care = 79
• Health and Personal Care Stores = 79
• Hospitals = 76
• Health Insurance = 73

In general, I found the industries to be very tightly clustered.  I’m going to reach out to them to see how to interpret that.  

About ACSI

The American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) is a national economic indicator of customer evaluations of the quality of products and services available to household consumers in the United States. The ACSI uses data from interviews with roughly 70,000 customers annually as inputs to an econometric model for analyzing customer satisfaction with more than 230 companies in 43 industries and 10 economic sectors, as well as over 100 services, programs, and websites of federal government agencies.

ACSI results are released throughout the year, with all measures reported on a scale of 0 to 100. ACSI data have proven to be strongly related to a number of essential indicators of micro and macroeconomic performance. For example, firms with higher levels of customer satisfaction tend to have higher earnings and stock returns relative to competitors. Stock portfolios based on companies that show strong performance in ACSI deliver excess returns in up markets as well as down markets. And, at the macro level, customer satisfaction has been shown to be predictive of both consumer spending and GDP growth.