By the way, I’ve also seen little discussion of why there are so few simple, high-deductible catastrophic policies.
My own thoughts on this is that if you don’t have a pricing club, the insurance companies worry that you’ll hit the deductible level too fast. And, it just isn’t worth it to them to provide both price mointoring and a high-limit policy.
It isn’t worth it to the Government to allow it, because if you buy fairly priced medical services out of your own pocket, and fairly priced, real insurance, how are they going to hit you for the cost-shifting they need to carry the parasites?
I’ve got an HSA, which is basically a self-funded catastrophic health plan that rolls your money from year to year if you don’t spend it.
At one point, the ObamaCAIR laws were going to outlaw HSAs. I was pleasantly surprised I was able to keep my plan for 2014.
Monitoring provider prices without making a payout to the provider is an expense to the insurance company which counts against Obamacare's 80 or 85% payout for healthcare. If some bean counter tells your hospital that the procedure they billed $10000 for is really only $3000, but you pay the $3000 yourself because you have a $5000 deductable, that bean counter has save you thousands of dollars but has cut into the insurer's 15-20% administrative/profit share. That makes those policies less desirable or completely unsustainable for the insurer. Thus they won't or can't sell catastrophic plans even if they are still technically legal.