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Showing posts with label High Deductible. Show all posts
Showing posts with label High Deductible. Show all posts

Saturday, April 30, 2016

In medical market, shoppers lack savvy

By Peter Ubel
The News and Observer
Originally posted April 6, 2016

Even before Obamacare became the law of the land, the U.S. health care system was undergoing a dramatic transformation. Millions of people were shifting from generous health insurance plans to consumer-directed ones that pair low monthly premiums with high out-of-pocket costs.

This shift has been encouraged by employers, eager to reduce the cost of employee benefits. It has also been encouraged by market enthusiasts who contend that the U.S. health care system needs to be more like the traditional consumer economy.

In theory, a family with a high deductible plan – on the hook for, say, the first $5,000 of health care expenses each year – will scrutinize the cost and quality of health care alternatives before deciding whether to receive them. In practice, health care consumerism doesn’t always play out at the bedside in ways that promote savvy medical decisions.

The article is here.

Highlights:

  • A shift from generous health insurance plans to consumer-directed plans has not helped people
  • Most patients, or doctors, do not know how to discuss out-of-pocket health care costs
  • Frustration with our system often distracts physicians from dealing with patients’ financial concerns

Tuesday, January 20, 2015

Dilemma over deductibles: Costs crippling middle class

By Laura Ungarand Jayne O'Donnell
The Battle Creek Enquirer
Originally published January 2, 2015

Here are two excerpts:

A recent Commonwealth Fund survey found that four in 10 working-age adults skipped some kind of care because of cost. The portion of workers with annual deductibles — what consumers must pay before insurance kicks in — rose from 55% eight years ago to 80% today, according to research by the Kaiser Family Foundation.

A Mercer study showed that 2014 saw the largest one-year increase in enrollment in “high-deductible plans” — from 18% to 23% of all covered employees.

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Doctors and doctor groups say such individual coping strategies can be helpful, but action is needed on a national level. The American Academy of Pediatrics recently came out with a policy statement saying high-deductible plans “may be a less desirable way to lower health care costs than other means … even if ‘other means’ require more work by government, insurance companies and other health policy participants.”

The entire story is here.

Saturday, January 26, 2013

Who Knew? Patients’ Share Of Health Spending Is Shrinking

By Jay Hancock
KHN Staff Writer
Originally published January 13, 2013

Consumer-driven medical spending may be the second-biggest story in health care, after the Affordable Care Act. As employers give workers more "skin in the game" through higher costs from purse and paycheck, the thinking goes, they'll seek more efficient treatment and hold down overall spending.

But consumers may not have as much skin in the game as experts thought, new government figures show.

Despite rapid growth in high-deductible health plans and rising employee contributions for insurance premiums, consumers' share of national health spending continued to fall in 2011, slipping to its lowest level in decades.

"I'm surprised," says Jonathan Gruber, a health economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "All the news is about the move to high-deductible health plans. Based on that logic … I would have expected it to go up."

True, medical costs are still pressuring families. Household health expense has outpaced sluggish income growth in recent years, says Micah Hartman, a statistician with the Department of Health and Human Services, which calculates the spending data.

But from a wider perspective, consumer health costs continued a trend of at least a quarter-century of taking up smaller and smaller parts of the health-spending pie. Household expense did go up. But other medical spending rose faster, especially for the government Medicare and Medicaid programs.

The entire article is here.