Polls have suggested that consumers value low monthly premiums over access to prestigious healthcare institutions such as (expensive) teaching hospitals affiliated with famous universities, and thus are willing to be in narrow insurance networks.

Bruce Spurlock and Maribeth Shannon, writing in HealthAffairs, conclude  that “except for a handful of outlier networks, consumers can have confidence that the hospital care in their region is comparable to other plans’ product networks, and that network size does not seem to typically influence performance.

“The major caveat is that some extremely narrow networks with overall lower-performing hospitals probably would benefit from a more inclusive network structure or a marked improvement in performance of the participating hospitals.”