The latest Bloomberg Businessweek muses that conservatives who oppose the 2010 federal health care law ought to like at least one development that has emerged from the law’s implementation: the growth of interest in high-deductible health insurance plans.
When millions of uninsured Americans go shopping for health plans in the Obamacare marketplaces opening on Oct. 1, many are expected to choose high-deductible plans. These policies are often the cheapest available, but they come with a tradeoff: Patients pay low premiums in exchange for shouldering the cost of most care until they reach deductibles of $1,000 or more. It’s a model Democrats have long deplored and one that Republicans, who this summer voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act for the 40th time in the House, have spent two decades promoting.
As Democrats pushed for universal health care during the Clinton years, Republicans argued that consumers should pay a greater share of their medical bills. In 1996 the GOP-controlled Congress passed legislation allowing some people to pair high-deductible plans—which barely existed—with tax-free health savings accounts. That meant that small business owners and their employees, as well as others with limited insurance options, could put away pretax earnings to pay for routine care and buy cheap insurance to cover catastrophes. In 2003 Congress, still under GOP control, passed legislation making health accounts more widely available. Many companies have since latched on to high-deductible plans as a way to keep premiums under control. Today, one in five workers is covered by such policies, up from 4 percent in 2006, according to a new Kaiser Family Foundation study of more than 2,000 employers.
Obamacare is likely to make high-deductible policies more common.
The John Locke Foundation has discussed the benefits of health savings accounts tied to high-deductible insurance policies. An even better option: A consumer-driven health care model.
