QuickTake: Nonelderly Workers with ESI Are Satisfied with Nonfinancial Aspects of Their Coverage but Less Satisfied with Financial Aspects
By Adele Shartzer and Sharon K. Long
Urban Institute, September 4, 2014
The Urban Institute’s Health Reform Monitoring Survey has been tracking health insurance coverage, including employer-sponsored insurance coverage (ESI), since the first quarter of 2013. This QuickTake reports on nonelderly (ages 18–64) workers’ ESI in June 2014. In June 2014, most workers (88.6 percent) were insured and, among those who were insured, most (80.7 percent) had ESI (data not shown). When asked to assess their ESI, workers were generally satisfied with their ESI in terms of available health care services, choice of doctors and other providers, and the quality of the care available under the plan; less than 5 percent of nonelderly workers with ESI coverage report being dissatisfied with any of these factors. However, satisfaction levels are much lower for the financial aspects of coverage, with workers more concerned about premiums, co-payments, and their potential financial risk from high medical bills. Nearly one in four nonelderly workers with ESI (23.4 percent) is dissatisfied with the premium they pay for coverage, and 27.2 percent are dissatisfied with the deductibles they pay when receiving care. The protection that ESI provides against high medical bills may be particularly limited for low-income nonelderly workers (those with family income at or below 138 percent of FPL): 32.1 percent of low-income workers with full-year ESI report having problems paying medical bills in the past 12 months. Overall, 14.2 percent of nonelderly workers with full-year ESI report having problems paying medical bills over the past 12 months.
http://hrms.urban.org/quicktakes/Nonelderly-workers-with-ESI.html
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How People Feel About Their Employer-Sponsored Health Plans
By Margot Sanger-Katz
The New York Times, September 4, 2014
There are new results from the Urban Institute’s Health Reform Monitoring Survey, which asked people with employer-based coverage how they liked what they had.
For people earning between 138 percent and 400 percent of the federal poverty limit, or between $33,000 to $95,000 — the income range of people who are most likely to buy insurance on the public marketplaces — more than 23 percent of workers with employer coverage reported having problems paying their medical bills in the last year.
Sharon Long, a senior fellow at Urban, said that the results suggested that consumers might not be prepared for what happened when they combined a high-deductible insurance plan with big medical bills.
“What we’ve heard anecdotally from people with health plans is more people are signing up for high-deductible health plans and then being surprised that they have to pay the deductible,” she said. That’s a concern on the new health insurance marketplaces, too. Early evidence suggests that people tended to opt for cheaper plans, many of which came with high deductibles — meaning that the newly insured may face some of the same financial strain if they become seriously ill.
Deductibles and co-payments have been rising, as a growing number of employers embrace the idea that giving workers more of a financial stake in their medical care will help reduce overuse. “It’s been going up over the past few years,” said Gary Claxton, a director of the Health Care Marketplace Project at the Kaiser Family Foundation, which runs a comprehensive annual survey of the employer insurance market. And no one likes paying high insurance premiums or out-of-pocket costs
Over all, Ms. Long said, the rising costs of health care are likely to remain a concern for consumers, wherever they get their insurance. “I expect what we’ll see over time, unless we are able to get costs under control, is that all the cost questions are going to be an issue,” she said.
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Worried about health insurance? That’s common
By Jay MacDonald
Bankrate.com, September 4, 2014
Bankrate’s Health Insurance Pulse survey was conducted Aug. 21-24 by Princeton Survey Research Associates International.
Tom Baker, a professor of insurance law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, points out that a majority of working adults receive their health insurance through their employer and thus have largely been spared a direct impact from the Obama health care law. But the survey’s concerned majority may partially reflect uneasiness about employer-based plans.
“There is research being done on liquidity, or ‘financial fragility,’ where they asked people if they could come up with $2,000 to pay for a major medical bill in the next month,” he says. “I think 40 percent of respondents said they either couldn’t or it would be very difficult. That suggests that people are financially fragile.”
David Cusano, a senior research fellow at Georgetown University’s Health Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., suspects some of the fear over health costs may stem from growing first-hand experience with how health insurance works.
“With the Affordable Care Act, anybody who now wants insurance can get it,” Cusano says. “The question now becomes: ‘Can I afford to use it?’ When you think about people confronting out-of-pocket maximums at around $7,000 or deductibles of $5,000 for a family, that’s a lot of money. You throw prescription drug copays into the mix, and I can see where you would be worried.”
http://www.bankrate.com/finance/insurance/health-insurance-poll-0814.aspx
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Comment:
By Don McCanne, MD
These two surveys are of people who have employer-sponsored health insurance – the very large market of health plans that was protected by the Affordable Care Act (“you can keep the insurance you have”). The most significant change in employer-sponsored plans is in the increased use of high deductibles as a means of slowing premium growth for the employers.
The trade off is that employees and their families are exposed to greater out-of-pocket costs whenever they access health care. These surveys demonstrate that this exposure is not merely theoretical but is actually creating significant financial insecurity for the insured.
But isn’t the primary purpose of insurance to relieve you of financial hardship should you have health care needs? Instead, these newer insurance product designs are increasing the risk of financial hardship, both in the employer-sponsored market, and especially, by design, in the plans offered by the ACA insurance exchanges. That is why they selected a lower actuarial value plan as the benchmark plan in the exchanges.
Reform should have been about fixing the problems with our health care financing, not making them worse. A far better system would simply provide access to health care when needed, without linking that care to specific financial transactions controlled by a third party insurance intermediary. We don’t need private insurance programs. We would do far better with prepaid health care, financed equitably through progressive tax policies.
It’s in our name. PNHP is Physicians for a National Health Program, not physicians for private health insurance.
