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COVID-19 hospitalizations could mean significant out-of-pocket medical costs for many Americans:
For their study, the researchers analyzed out-of-pocket costs for pneumonia and other upper respiratory illness hospitalizations from January 2016 through August 2019 as a potential indicator of likely COVID-19 costs. The researchers found that these out-of-pocket costs were particularly high for so-called consumer-directed health plans -- which typically feature lower premiums, compared to standard plans, but higher deductibles that can be paid via tax-advantaged health savings accounts.
[...] Many big-name health insurers have voluntarily waived out-of-pocket cost sharing for COVID-19 treatment. However, employer-sponsored "self-insured" health insurance plans are not required to adhere to such waivers. Thus, tens of millions of Americans have high-deductible insurance plans that, in cases of COVID-19 hospitalization, may expose them to relatively high out-of-pocket costs.
[...] To get a sense of the likely cost burden on patients hospitalized for COVID-19, Eisenberg and colleagues examined de-identified insurance claims for 34,395 unique hospitalizations from January 2016 through August 2019. They looked at out-of-pocket costs incurred by people who had been hospitalized during the 2016-2019 study period with pneumonia, acute bronchitis, lower respiratory infections, and acute respiratory distress syndrome. (Claims data on actual COVID-19 cases were not available in the database at the time of the study.) The cases examined did not include those for people ages 65 and over, who are normally covered by Medicare. The out-of-pocket costs included deductible payments, copayments, and coinsurance payments.
The researchers found that average out-of-pocket spending for the 2016-2019 study period for these respiratory hospitalizations was $1,961 for patients with consumer-directed plans versus $1,653 for patients in traditional, usually smaller-deductible plans.
The out-of-pocket cost gap was lowest for older patients age 56 to 64, and greatest -- $2,237 vs. $1,685 -- for patients 21 and younger. The analysis was not designed to examine why the cost gap varied inversely with patient age, but one possible explanation proposed by the researchers was that, since younger patients are healthier on average, their hospitalizations may reflect more serious and thus more costly illness.
Journal Reference: Matthew D. Eisenberg, Colleen L. Barry, Cameron Schilling, Alene Kennedy-Hendricks. Financial Risk for COVID-19-like Respi- ratory Hospitalizations in Consumer-Directed Health Plans, American Journal of Preventive Medicine (2020), doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.amepre.2020.05.008
(Score: 2) by legont on Tuesday June 16 2020, @10:14PM (1 child)
The year Obamacare started, my insurance premium almost doubled and deductible went up 10 times. The service at the same time was reduced to Obamacare standards. I am talking about what used to be "Cadillac" insurance at the best corporation. So yeah, we've been reduced to the N level while N were not up at all.
Anybody expects any different this time?
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 17 2020, @05:02AM
But they had already gutted COBRA and independent health care plans as far back as 2000. My dad retired from a silicon valley firm at a base rate of 150/mo per family member (4 of us), within 5 years they were flipflopping between age and existing medical conditions to charge 350/750 for either us kids and my parents, or later me and my dad, and my sister and mother. After we kids dropped insurance they worked their way up to like 1000 per month if they would have had the same level of care. They instead dropped it, which significantly increased their deductables and copays, and only held onto their drug plans until they were within 5-10 years of medicare at which point my mom had to reduce that and push her doctors to cut her medicines back.
long story short: he burned through most of his retirement paying medical insurance each month, didn't recieve more than the minimalist yearly or biyearly checkups, and then moved to the last sort-of good medical in the region (One of the UC hospitals.) All three of the major insurance groups out here who ran hospitals had multiple malpractice suits and multiple deaths, ranging from negligence to outright human experimentation (one doctor was in fact using unproven techniques on his patients, which after a few died were proven to lack efficacy or the oversight required to even be allowed to use them in the first place!)
So yeah, US health care is fucked up, down, and sideway, and while Obamacare may have 'made an example' out of some of you, it was only because you had been neglecting to see what your fellow citizens had been getting for the past 10-15 years, or longer depending on region.