High-deductible, lower premium health insurance plans appear poised to have an increasing role in American’s insurance options as the Trump administration, employers, and others seek to control health costs, even though researchers know little about how these plans impact health care, according to a January 18, 2017 Marketplace article.
The article describes how Ashish Jha, K.T. Li Professor of International Health at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, conducted his own experiment on high-deductible health insurance plans by switching his own family to one of them.
“I thought…it would be really useful, as a family, to know what it actually feels like to have to pay for everything out of pocket at least until you hit your deductible,” said Jha. But like many others on these plans, Jha found himself foregoing potentially important medical care to avoid expensive out-of-pocket costs.
During a recent business trip when his heart wouldn’t stop racing, Jha didn’t want to go to the emergency room because of the cost. Luckily, his heart calmed down on its own. “I knew there was a big bill waiting for me if I [went to the hospital], and I rolled the dice,” he told Marketplace.
Read more about Jha’s experiment in the Marketplace article: Do high-deductible plans make the health care system better?