Please keep in mind that this post is NOT directed at you Kats, but at US.
Same here. There is the rub. Unless you have a top of the line plan that you pay for the nose through every month in premiums, it is going to cost you to go see the doc and get medical care.
What gets lost in the shuffle, is when we pick our bronze plan we made a conscious decision to trade off lower monthly premiums for the risk that we might have a health event and have to pay deductibles and co-pays. IMO that is a good bet for most healthy people, but sometimes it doesn't work out and it seems that the older you get the less it works out.
I think the problem in may cases is that people have developed an expectation that if you go to the doc you only pay a small co-pay ($25 or $50) and insurance takes care of the rest of the bill. It is analogous to expecting our car insurance to pay for tires and oil changes and timing belts.
What we need to get to is a mindset where we each acknowledge that we are financially responsible for our health and realize that if we need medical care it costs money and we have to pay, and insurance is to protect us from a "bad" year health wise or some sort of health event. While I know many here understand that intellectually, why is it still so hard to go to the doc when we have something bothering us know that we'll be facing a ~$200 bill?
I'm not sure if it is necessarily a problem with high deductible policies as the same psychology may relate to those with silver pr perhaps even gold plans.
I guess that I think that even for people who can't afford deductibles and co-pays that a HDHI plan is better than no health insurance at all. At worst, they have a big bill they have to negotiate down and pay off over a number of years rather than likely bankruptcy if they have no health insurance and a huge hospital bill.
I agree with most everything you say up to a point. Like Katsmeow said, she had the $1,500 so it wasn't such a big deal.
I think the difference lies in your income level and what you have been accustomed to before. A very low wage earner is not accustomed to carrying insurance and uses the emergency room or a free clinic when available for care. So if this same individual did have insurance, it would be more likely they would not go to see the doctor because of the deductible, and if it turned out to be a blood clot, would probably have died.
Also, the large deductible deters low income people from signing up for insurance, and therefore defeats the intent to keep them out of the emergency room. The idea also is to treat people's disease before it becomes a serious problem.
It is easy for us to sit back and say: "It is better than not having any insurance." And that is of course 100% true. But if the idea is to get them insured and out of the hospitals, I think deductibles of more than $100/$200 will be a problem in achieving this goal unless the person is chronically ill.
Daylatedollarshort: Your chart shows that just over 10% of the 21% say they don't have internet or a computer at home because of financial reasons. That represents over 32,000,000 people. In my store at least 1/2 of my employees did not have a computer at home and required assistance from the receptionist at the front desk to go online and renew their license each year from work.
Couple that with the people who just don't follow the news nor have the innate desire to keep on top of what is going on in the world, and you get "The man in the Street" syndrome posted earlier on this thread.
Then throw on top of that the well orchestrated campaign to convince people the new healthcare reform is "bad" because it is attached to a political party they don't adhere to, and you have people just accepting without really looking into it.