America’s Underinsured
By Cathy Schoen, Susan L. Hayes, Sara R. Collins, Jacob A. Lippa, and David C. Radley
The Commonwealth Fund, March 2014
The twin goals of health insurance are to enable affordable access to health care and to alleviate financial burdens when injured or sick. It is well known that the uninsured are at high risk of forgoing needed care and of struggling to pay medical bills when they cannot postpone care. Studies further find that insured people who are poorly protected based on their households’ out-of-pocket costs for medical care are also at risk of not being able to afford to be sick.
Using newly available data from census surveys, this report provides national and state-level estimates of the number of people and share of the population that were insured but living in households that spent a high share of annual income on medical care in 2011–12. In the analysis, we refer to these people as “underinsured.” However, this group is only one subset of the underinsured. Our estimates do not include insured people who needed care but went without it because of the out-of-pocket costs they would incur, or the insured who stayed healthy during the year but whose health insurance would have exposed them to high medical costs had they needed and sought care.
The analysis finds that in 2012, there were 31.7 million insured people under age 65 who were underinsured. Together with the 47.3 million who were uninsured, this means at least 79 million people were at risk for not being able to afford needed care before the major reforms of the Affordable Care Act took hold.
In all states, people with low incomes are at greatest risk for being underinsured or uninsured. Nationally, in 2012, nearly two-thirds (63%) of those with incomes below the federal poverty level were either underinsured or uninsured. Among those with incomes between 100 percent and 199 percent of poverty, nearly half (47%) were underinsured or uninsured.
A decade or more of people losing health coverage and a steady erosion in the financial protection of insurance has also put middle-income families at risk. In 2012, one of five people (20%) under age 65 with middle incomes (between 200% and 399% of poverty)—an estimated 15.6 million people—were either underinsured or had no health insurance.
Low- and Middle-Income Households Most at Risk
The exposure to high out-of-pocket medical care costs even when people have insurance reflects insurance trends — including higher deductibles and cost-sharing, as well as gaps in benefits or limits on coverage — in both the employer and individual insurance markets. This puts insured families at risk in terms of access to health care and financial well- being. Studies indicate that low- and middle-income insured individuals and families who face high out- of-pocket costs for medical care relative to their incomes are nearly as likely as the uninsured population to go without care because of costs, forgo care when sick, struggle to pay medical bills, or incur medical debt. Both population groups — underinsured and uninsured — are at far higher risk of access or medical bill concerns than those with more protective coverage.
Premiums for Employer-Sponsored Insurance Have Risen More Rapidly Than Incomes, Value of Benefits Declined
Over the past decade, the cost of health insurance has risen far faster than incomes for middle- and low-income working-age families.
At the same time that premiums have risen, the value of benefits has declined. Deductibles more than doubled for plans provided by larger and small employers. This increase — plus other cost-sharing or limits on benefits — has left insured patients paying a higher share of medical bills. With little or no growth in incomes over a decade, insurance and care have become less affordable.
Medicaid and Income-Related Premium Assistance
Using newly available information on out-of-pocket payments for premiums, we estimate that 29 million insured people — 11 percent of the total under-age-65 population and 13 percent of the insured population under age 65 — paid premiums that exceeded the Affordable Care Act premium contribution thresholds for those at their household income level before reforms. In other words, they had high premium out-of-pocket costs compared with incomes, with “high” defined as in excess of Affordable Care Act contribution thresholds.
However, not everyone who pays high premiums relative to income will be eligible for help. The 29 million insured people includes 13.7 million with incomes below 138 percent of poverty who are paying premiums above the Affordable Care Act thresholds for this group. Of these, 8.8 million had private insurance they bought on their own or through employers. Based on their income alone, they would likely be eligible for expanded Medicaid if their state decides to participate in Medicaid expansions.
For those with incomes above Medicaid eligibility, the law restricts eligibility for premium assistance in marketplaces to people buying insurance on their own and to workers who have employer coverage where the employee’s premium costs for self-only coverage exceeds 9.5 percent of income. Among the 29 million insured with high premium costs in 2012, 11.7 million had employer-sponsored coverage and incomes that would be too high to qualify for expanded Medicaid.
Medicaid Expansion Makes a Critical Difference
Many of the states not participating in Medicaid expansion have among the highest rates of uninsured or underinsured people as a share of their total state populations. Without Medicaid expansion, this vulnerable group will remain at high risk for access, health, and financial problems.
Changing the Insurance Map of the Country
Substantial gains, however, will depend on the plans people choose and state efforts to ensure high-value benefit designs and accessible networks. One concern is to what extent people with low or modest incomes will opt for “bronze” level plans. People choosing bronze-level plans will pay 40 percent of medical care costs on average and thus remain at financial risk. Additionally, in choosing a bronze plan, people with low incomes forgo the cost-sharing subsidies that are tied to silver plans that substantially reduce out-of-pocket spending for medical care. As of February 2014, 62 percent of those enrolling in the new marketplaces selected silver plans, 19 percent had selected gold or platinum, and 19 percent had selected bronze.
In addition, it is important to note that the Affordable Care Act’s limits on out-of-pocket costs for covered benefits also apply only to in-network providers. As discussed in a recent report profiling insured people with medical debt, even with the new limits, the insured may encounter high medical care costs if they receive care from out-of-network clinicians.
From the Conclusion
However, the new marketplaces offer plans that include substantial cost-sharing and annual caps on out-of-pocket patient costs that apply to in-network providers only. With these benefit designs, there is the risk that the nation could convert the uninsured into the underinsured and fail to stop the erosion in insurance protections for people with private insurance coverage.
Full report (40 pages – several Exhibits and Tables):
http://www.commonwealthfund.org/~/media/Files/Publications/Fund%20Report/2014/Mar/1736_Schoen_americas_underinsured.pdf
Comment:
By Don McCanne, M.D.
This Commonwealth Fund report provides an estimate of the numbers of underinsured – people who could experience financial hardships and impaired access in the face of medical need. Although the authors express optimism that the numbers of uninsured will decline as a result of the provisions of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), there is a high probability that there will be a substantial increase in the numbers of people who will be underinsured.
The private insurance design features supported by ACA makes continued underinsurance an inevitability. The insured are vulnerable because of low actuarial value plans with high-deductibles and other cost sharing, narrow and ultra-narrow networks that impair access to in-network providers, inadequacies of the subsidies, and the perpetuation of an expensive, administrative wasteful model of financing care – a model that we all pay for, including the underinsured.
What is not expressed in the Commonwealth data is the number of people who may not have attempted to access care because of concerns of high out-of-pocket costs. Studies have shown that these people do forgo care that they should have.
A sobering thought is the even larger numbers of individuals not represented in this study. These are the people who remained healthy and never had to test the adequacy of their insurance. Tens of millions of people are vulnerable and would become financially insecure if they did develop significant health problems. This includes many individuals with employer-sponsored insurance. They are underinsured and don’t know it. Excluding these individuals from the underinsured count results in estimates far below the actual numbers.
The design of ACA makes it clear that both the uninsured and underinsured will remain a problem in the foreseeable future, but it will be underinsurance that will likely provoke widespread discontent. Its prevalence may well become the most compelling reason to abandon the perversities brought to us by the private insurance industry. People will be ready to replace our dysfunctional system with a single payer national health program that would eliminate, for everyone, financial barriers to health care.