An approach to health care that the consumers' unaffordable medical costs should be based on the value of a service to their health instead of its price, though relatively rare, is drawing the attention of increasing number of employers, insurers and policy experts.

Mercer, a benefits consulting company, discovered in a 2008 survey that 19 percent of employers having a minimum of 500 employees were charging workers less for the services that the companies thought had a greater value for the health of the workers.

Apart from that, over 80 percent of employers having a minimum of 10,000 workers surveyed by Mercer in 2007 showed their interest in adopting this model in the coming five years, as was said in a paper issued in November. It was one of the many which came out on the value-based insurance design, as it's called.

Certain provisions of this year's health-care overhaul are also incorporating value-based insurance principles, and even the need that new insurance policies make way for free recommended preventive services like mammograms and colon cancer screenings, beginning this fall.

The idea behind this is - certain things are so valuable to health care that there shouldn't be hindrance to their use.