“Every year my company changes the insurance. And instead of giving us three different choices for insurance plans they were changing to one, which was a high-deductible plan with no prescription coverage,” she said.
Cooper was stunned. Her anti-rejection medicine costs way more than she could afford on her own — more than $1,000 a month.
Cooper, 30, started a frantic search for help. Finally, she found the HealthWell Foundation, which was willing to pay for her medication. But she still couldn’t afford the $300 blood test she needs every month to make sure she’s not rejecting her liver.
“It is scary because the only way to tell if you’re going to go into rejection is by the blood work. Your numbers will be a little bit crazy and then the doctors will be like, ‘OK, you need to get in and we need to check you out and make sure you’re OK.’ So I really took a risk not getting that blood work done. But I couldn’t afford to get it done. I really couldn’t,” she said.
What happened to Cooper is happening more and more these days.
“Beneath the surface what health insurance is in the country has been changing really dramatically. And just in plain language it’s becoming skimpier and skimpier and less and less comprehensive,” said Drew Altman of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a private, non-profit, non-partisan research group. (KHN is a editorially independent program of the foundation).
Paul Fronstin of the Employee Benefits Research Institute says that is the trend nationally.
“Deductibles have gone up. Co-pays have gone up. You see costing-sharing for out-of-network services have gone up,” Fronstin said. “It seems to have accelerated in the last few years. Health care is just continuing to take a bigger bite out of take-home pay.”
So even people with insurance are paying thousands of dollars out of pocket before their insurance kicks in. And even when it does, insurance picks up less then it used to — often a lot less.
SOURCE Health Insurance Cutbacks Squeeze The Insured – Kaiser Health News.