Bipartisan legislation aims to get more Americans into high-deductible insurance, but perils would remain.
For thrifty consumers, there’s a lot to like in high-deductible health insurance. The plans offer low monthly premiums and those fees fully cover preventive care, including annual physicals, vaccinations, mammograms and colonoscopies, with no co-payments.
The downside is that plan participants must pay the insurers’ negotiated rate for sick visits, medicines, surgeries and other treatments up to a minimum deductible of $1,500 for individuals and $3,000 for families. Sometimes deductibles are much higher.
Genuine question, because my liberal dad didn’t understand what I meant when I asked - isn’t a deductible basically just another tactic for the insurance company to further weasel out of its responsibilities? I’m pretty sure the deductible of the insurance I get through my job is higher than I already pay them yearly. If my expenses are lower than that, I’ve basically given them ~$1500 for doing literally nothing. I may as well just pay out of pocket, but I can’t since insurance fucked the system for the uninsured.
The idea with high deductible plans is that the ordinary policyholder just pays out of pocket for everything in a normal year, but they’re covered against catastrophic loss in years when they get in a $50,000 car accident or need $750,000 worth of chemo and cancer treatments. The insurance might not provide much for the 30 or 40 years of your life in which you spend less than $1,000 per year on a few doctor’s visits, but it’ll pay for itself that one year when you’re paying $5,000 instead of $1,000,000.
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Genuine question, because my liberal dad didn’t understand what I meant when I asked - isn’t a deductible basically just another tactic for the insurance company to further weasel out of its responsibilities? I’m pretty sure the deductible of the insurance I get through my job is higher than I already pay them yearly. If my expenses are lower than that, I’ve basically given them ~$1500 for doing literally nothing. I may as well just pay out of pocket, but I can’t since insurance fucked the system for the uninsured.
The idea with high deductible plans is that the ordinary policyholder just pays out of pocket for everything in a normal year, but they’re covered against catastrophic loss in years when they get in a $50,000 car accident or need $750,000 worth of chemo and cancer treatments. The insurance might not provide much for the 30 or 40 years of your life in which you spend less than $1,000 per year on a few doctor’s visits, but it’ll pay for itself that one year when you’re paying $5,000 instead of $1,000,000.