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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 17 2020, @12:14AM (1 child)
I'm going to assume you're stupid rather than trolling and explain.
No. The fact that medical costs have increased faster than inflation over the last fifty years is orthogonal to whether or not something can be done more cheaply by government
That the Medicare (government) program has overhead many times lower than private insurance, and is, in fact much cheaper is *directly* related to the question of whether or not government can do something less expensively than the private sector, in that the Medicare program does just that.
It is, in fact, specifically answering the question asked. Much more so than any comparison of current vs. historical medical costs.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 17 2020, @01:28AM
No one mentioned whether the government can do something cheaper. Stop bringing up semirelated stuff.
Fact is that healthcare is about 40x more expensive now than before medicare. So thats not an example of the gov getting involved then something getting cheaper.