Well, the "no lifetime limits" is thanks to the legislative healthcare reforms that were driven by a need to reduce the number of medical bankruptcies, so obviously that's a good step towards making healthcare more affordable to people who previously would have been driven into bankruptcy.
But a $3000 yearly deductible is still likely to be utterly unaffordable to a significant portion of the uninsured, and it would be surprising if they weren't subject to copays as well.
Read his post about HSA and how it plays into his retirement. Most high deductible plans have full coverage ( 100% ) when the deductible is reached.
Worst case scenario it costs him $4000 ($3000 of which is pre tax) a year. Thats ~300/month. Best case he doesn't visit the doctor once and it cost him $1000 and he puts $3000 into his rainy day / retirement account.
You need to have $3000 available day one of each year to do this, but it makes a lot more economic sense.
And I have enough savings to pull this off for decades should it come to that.
Granted if one gets so sick so as to max out the deductible every year consistently, one's life expectancy is probably not that long
If one stays healthy, unused money in the HSA becomes the equivalent of an IRA and can be used for nonhealth-related expenses after a certain age (I forget whether it's 59.5 or slightly higher).
I actually opted out of my employee plan when I was working in order to get in on this for the tax deduction. (My employer wasn't offering HSA eligible plans.)
I'm not talking about him, I'm talking about why these $85/month plans aren't the blanket answer to the question of solving medical bankruptcies among the uninsured.
Not surprised. This is insurance. You don't get car insurance after you've gotten in a wreck, and you should expect to pay more for it if you're more likely to get in a wreck (e.g. lots of speeding tickets, etc).
That's not quite accurate. Depending on how one measures somewhere between 40% and 70% of health care costs are used to treat lifestyle diseases (too much stress, too much food, not enough exercise) like high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes, tobacco, alcohol, avoidable accidents, etc. Those problems are not genetic. They're behavioral.
Of course one can suffer these things without having the risk factors. I presume the experts who calculated those numbers corrected for that.
So in about half the cases (half the cost to be precise), sickness really is your fault.
One of the reasons high deductible plans have such low premiums despite not screwing people over with small print is that they attract a more healthy segment of the population, because a high deductible creates some incentive to avoid those [preventable] diseases.
As it is, people are only hit on their regular expensive plans if they smoke. Imagine if they were also hit with higher premiums if they were overweight (BMI>25, 2/3s of Americans are overweight), drank too much, smoked too much, didn't engage in regular physical activity, etc. Then the premiums for those who have a lifestyle which wasn't likely to cause chronic diseases would only pay half of what they're currently paying. Those who engage in risky lifestyles would see their premiums increase by 50%.
But a $3000 yearly deductible is still likely to be utterly unaffordable to a significant portion of the uninsured, and it would be surprising if they weren't subject to copays as well.