I don’t think this is about Obama Care high deductible plans, which are both expensive and have high deductibles. I think this is talking about high deduct plans (with or without HSAs) that have been around for a while.
We have one. It has a 10K deductible BUT…BUT...It is about 10 thousand dollars less expensive than a low deductible plan per year in premium…..it’s simpler, less paperwork and so on. I think most people who are on such a pln understand it. But again, we don’t have all the Obamacare strings attached to it.
It’s like the old major medical stuff…WHICH WORKED!
The people I know got burned in one of two ways:
1) They did not realize that there was a low yearly cap on the total insurance payout (”mini-med”) plans.
2) They had plan like the one you described, got really sick (cancer, etc.), and were dropped next plan cycle - and left with no insurance from their old carrier, and no chance of getting new insurance except through a state “high-risk” pool, which was closed to new applicants or had a long waiting line.
These are the people who spend down their assets to bankruptcy and then go on Medicaid - essentially, the rest of us are their “backup” insurers.
A lot of people do not like the ACA because it essentially bans the first type of policy, and prevents the sort of cancellations in the second case.
IMO, it’s not as easy a call as it first appears: we naturally want people to have freedom of individual choice about want type of insurance to purchase, but a lot of people end up making a choice that *guarantees* their costs will be shifted to *rest of us* if things go wrong.
Plus, you have the issue that a lot of the people who *want* to be responsible *can’t* afford better insurance.
The end result is that unless you put your head in the sand and ignore that fact that *someone* ends up paying for such care, when you try to come up with a system where everyone pays at least *something* for care they will receive, you come up with mandatory insurance + minimum coverage requirements + subsidies - in other words, something rather like the ACA.
From this perspective, one of the major things wrong with the ACA is that by subsidizing existing insurance practices - which *depend* on making it hard to discover in advance what service is being provided and what it will cost - it perpetrates a system designed to make “comparison shopping” difficult or impossible and continues insurance practices which make it difficult to discover which high-deductible plans makes sense to a given consumer.
So I would argue that as regards such disclosure the ACA(which tries to make apples-to-apples comparisons between standardized plans possible) does not go *far enough*”, and mostly, as part of a cozy deal to protect the current Byzantine pricing and insurance arrangements between providers and insurers.