This is funny‼️ funny in the ironic, not really funny sense and it points out two important things. Human nature being what it is, spending someone else’s money is a lot easier than spending your own money and many Americans have no clue what they are doing when signing up for health insurance.
Neither bode well for the long-term success of Obamacare.
Oh, there is something else funny about all this … that in October 2014 these are just becoming revelations deserving of an article in the New York Times. I think I deserve a big “I told you so!”
So, is this what we mean by affordable health care; low premiums because they are subsidized and because high deductibles are used? Yeah, that is exactly what supporters of the Affordable Care Act mean because that is the only way to make it appear premiums have been lowered.
Patricia Wanderlich got insurance through the Affordable Care Act this year, and with good reason: She suffered a brain hemorrhage in 2011, spending weeks in a hospital intensive care unit, and has a second, smaller aneurysm that needs monitoring.
But her new plan has a $6,000 annual deductible, meaning that Ms. Wanderlich, who works part time at a landscaping company outside Chicago, has to pay for most of her medical services up to that amount. She is skipping this year’s brain scan and hoping for the best.
“To spend thousands of dollars just making sure it hasn’t grown?” said Ms. Wanderlich, 61. “I don’t have that money.”
“Gina Brown, 37, of Nashville, was paying about $155 a month for a Blue Cross Blue Shield of Tennessee plan, after taking account of her subsidy. But her deductible was $4,000, she said, and so she avoided going to the doctor even when she got an ear infection over the summer.
“I attempted to treat it with over-the-counter and homeopathic meds,” she said. “Eventually it went away.”
Ms. Brown recently got a job with health benefits, so she canceled the marketplace plan. Her new insurance has a deductible of $1,000, but primary care visits and prescriptions are not subject to the deductible.
“Now that I know I can go and safely just pay a co-pay,” she said, “it makes me feel better.”
Mark Yuschak, 57, of Jackson, N.J., said he had a silver plan with an annual deductible of $3,000. He discovered its limits in March.
“My wife had an incident, a digestive disorder, and we had to go to the emergency room of a hospital in Freehold, N.J.,” Mr. Yuschak said. “We presented our insurance card and filled out all the forms. They told us, ‘You don’t have a co-payment, you’re free to go.’ ”
Later, though, they received a bill “that could choke a horse,” Mr. Yuschak said — for more than $1,000. “Our insurance wouldn’t cover any of it because we had not met our deductible.”
Carol Payne, a respiratory therapist in Gilbert, Ariz., signed up through HealthCare.gov for a Blue Cross Blue Shield plan with a $6,000 deductible. She pays $91 toward her monthly premium and gets a subsidy of $353 to cover the rest.
The plans she could have chosen with lower deductibles were from insurers that “were not as reputable,” Ms. Payne said. She has used the insurance for preventive care and an emergency room visit after a car accident.
“I’m just doing what I can to keep myself healthy,” she added. “I mean, $6,000 — do they think I’ve just got that under my mattress?”
via Unable to Meet the Deductible or the Doctor – NYTimes.com.
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