Physician Praveen Arla is witnessing a reversal of health care fortunes: Poor, long-uninsured patients are getting Medicaid through Obamacare and finally coming to his office for care. But middle-class workers are increasingly staying away.
“It’s flip-flopped,” says Arla, who helps his father run a family practice in Hillview, Ky. Patients with job-based plans, he says, will say: ” ‘My deductible is so high. I’m trying to come to the doctor as little as possible. ”¦ What is the minimum I can get done?’ They’re really worried about cost.”
It’s a deep and common concern across the USA, where employer plans cover 60% of working-age Americans, or about 150 million people. Coverage long considered the gold standard of health insurance now often requires workers to pay so much out-of-pocket that many feel they must skip doctor visits, put off medical procedures, avoid filling prescriptions and ration pills ”” much as the uninsured have done.
My deductible hasn’t changed but the calculation of payments certainly has. I have a chronic, but fortunately mild and treatable, issue. Over the past few years I have noticed that I am paying for services – or paying more – than in the past. I have to agree that both my wife & I are looking harder at options (not necessarily a bad thing) and deferring treatments.