Dear Mr. Berko: What will it cost my healthy son and his wife if they don’t buy a high-deductible health plan, which would be a waste of money? High-deductible plans are a joke. They’re great for the insurers because patients pay for everything except catastrophic occurrences. A $4,000 annual premium with a $4,000 deductible for each would be worthless. They each would have to spend $8,000 before any coverage would kick in. High-deductible plans enrich the insurance industry while hurting the patient.
— B.C., Punta Gorda, Fla.
Dear B.C.: Is this a question or a complaint?
This insurance stuff is terribly complicated, and your lad’s numbers don’t make sense to me. He must counsel with an insurance professional for the straight skinny. But the tables are turning to patients’ advantage, and medical costs could fall significantly in the coming decade.
If your son and his wife were not to purchase health insurance, the penalty would be either 2 percent of their annual income above $20,300, which is about the cost of Obamacare’s bronze plan, or $650 for the year, whichever is higher. The maximum penalty per family is $975. How ducky! Therefore, many families are buying high-deductible health care plans, or HDPs, which only cover catastrophic illnesses, for $50 to $70 a month. So $4,000 a year sounds out of line.
Because HDPs are enormously cheaper than the plans of yesteryear, 38 million Americans have signed up, and 86 percent of employers now offer HDPs, compared with 38 percent in 2012. HDPs are becoming increasingly popular, and this trend will continue as Obamacare’s 40 percent tax on “Cadillac plans” takes effect. As millions of Americans move into HDPs, health care spending will change the way patients deal with doctors, hospitals, rehab centers, medical equipment supply companies, imaging centers, etc. And there will be significant changes in how the medical community relates to patients.
