People buy health insurance because medical bills can be extremely expensive, especially if a person has a serious illness or injury. However, a study shows that having health insurance does not guarantee that you will not accrue a debt from your medical bills. Health insurance can help with some of your medical bills, but not all of them, and not all of the time.
Health insurance can be confusing. It isn’t easy to understand exactly what kinds of treatments, services, and prescriptions will be covered by your health insurance plan, and which you will be expected to pay for out of pocket. It can be hard to fit co-pays and deductible payments into your budget, especially if you did not realize that you would be expected to come up with those kinds of payments out of pocket.
Obviously, having health insurance coverage is better than the alternative. Those who don’t have any form of health insurance are stuck paying 100% of their medical bills out of their own pocket. A serious illness or a trip to the Emergency Room can quickly turn into a devastating amount of debt. It would seem as though purchasing a good health insurance policy should mean that you have protected yourself from ending up with a large amount of debt from medical bills. Unfortunately, that isn’t necessarily true.
A study that was published in the American Journal of Public Health finds that having health insurance doesn’t lower the odds that a person will accrue debt from medical care or medications. The study looked at data from over 2,300 cases from the Arizona Health Survey.
That survey included 4,200 households in Arizona, and was designed to assess things like insurance coverage, health status, and other behaviors and environmental factors that affect health. It is worth noting that the survey was done in 2008, which means it was before the recent recession and high unemployment rates occurred. This study included data from people who were between the ages of 18 and 64, (excluding those over age 65 who were eligible for Medicare).
Overall, the study concluded two interesting things. First of all, it was clear that having health insurance was not protecting people from ending up in debt due to medical bills. It also found that once a person, or a family, has a high amount of debt due to medical bills, people tend to avoid seeking necessary medical care. The debt also prevented people from purchasing the prescription medications that they needed.
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