August 31, 2021

Several million retirees have spent so much on their prescriptions in recent years that they crossed over into the “catastrophic” phase of their Medicare drug plans.

Once catastrophic coverage kicks in, Part D drug plans require retirees to pay only 5 percent of their medication costs out of their own pockets. But there’s a catch: there is no cap on total annual spending, which can quickly rise to thousands of dollars if they need chemotherapy or a brand-name designer drug for a rare medical condition.

Juliette Cubanski, deputy director of the Kaiser Family Foundation’s Medicare policy program, said that could change, because proposals to place a cap on total out-of-pocket spending in Part D plans have a bipartisan tailwind behind them. Democrats in the House recently reintroduced a bill that would limit spending to $2,000. Last year, the Republican-controlled Senate Finance Committee approved a $3,100 cap, which is currently part of a Republican prescription drug bill.

Now, President Biden says he wants to limit retirees’ spending in their Part D plans. However, the bills circulating on Capitol Hill could also become tangled up in a more complex debate about a related issue: the best way to control drug prices.

A flat dollar cap – if it passes – would be simpler than the current system for determining out-of-pocket drug costs, though it would mainly help people with extraordinarily high spending. Cubanski said most people on Medicare spend less than $2,000 out-of-pocket annually.

But in a given year, she said, “that could be anybody.” And as baby boomers stampede into retirement, more people will be pushed into catastrophic coverage at a time of continually rising drug prices. …Learn More

August 12, 2021

At $140 billion, the nation’s unpaid medical bills are the single largest form of past due debt. One thing driving this is no doubt rising deductibles for health insurance.

A third of insured Americans said in a survey that it is difficult to pay the deductibles in their employer health insurance plans and in the policies sold on the Affordable Care Act (ACA) marketplaces.

Among employer-sponsored insurance plans, policies with high deductibles are becoming more pervasive, even in large corporations. Employers are choosing high-deductible plans in part to keep their workers’ monthly premiums at a reasonable level – a tradeoff that is inherent in health insurance.

But the sky-high cost of medical care can quickly run-up out-of-pocket spending in years when someone in the family becomes very ill or needs surgery. Average deductibles exceed $3,000 for a single worker’s policy in half of the U.S. companies with less than 200 workers. The family plan deductibles exceed $6,000 in more than 40 percent of small companies.

ACA plan deductibles are rising in almost every state and have surpassed $4,000 per year, on average, in 11 states from Arizona and Michigan to Oregon. A variety of plans are available on the exchanges, including plans with lower deductibles for people willing to pay higher premiums. But ACA premiums have also been rising, though the federal government has temporarily increased the premium subsidies as part of COVID-19 relief.

New research appearing in the July issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) estimates that medical bills made up more than half of all the consumer debt in collections last year. And the data are through June 2020 and don’t even reflect the full cost of caring for COVID patients. …Learn More

July 29, 2021

The Affordable Care Act gives a carrot to states that expand Medicaid from a health insurance program mainly for poor people to one that also includes low-income workers.

Under the 2010 law, the federal government initially paid the full cost of adding more people to the Medicaid rolls, and a large majority of states have signed up. The federal funding for new expansions dropped a bit in 2020 to 90 percent and will remain there.

Yet 11 states are holdouts and haven’t expanded their programs, leaving nearly 2.2 million workers and family caregivers in what the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities calls the Medicaid coverage gap.

The workers falling in the gap, who would qualify for coverage if their states expanded Medicaid, do not have health insurance at their places of employment and can’t afford to buy subsidized insurance through the Affordable Care Act.

The bulk of the uncovered workers are in the South, with half in Texas and Florida. Missouri had been a holdout. But last week, the Missouri Supreme Court ordered the legislature to comply with a voter ballot initiative and fund expansion of the state’s Medicaid. Expansion was also controversial in Oklahoma, but it went into effect on July 1 after voters there approved the measure.

An analysis by the Center sketched a picture of who is in the gap, based on 2019 Medicaid data, the most recent available. People of color comprised about 40 percent of the working-age population but made up 60 percent of the people in the gap in the non-expansion states, the Center estimates.

Nationwide, one in four who lack access to Medicaid are lower-paid essential workers on the front lines during the pandemic. …Learn More

Money Culture

June 15, 2021

The cost of employer health insurance has skyrocketed, and workers are picking up some of that growing tab. Amid employees’ grumbling, employers are loath to push more of the cost onto their workers.

That’s why the consensus view among major employers, expressed in a recent survey, sounded like a cry for help. Calling rising insurance costs “unsustainable,” the vast majority said they need help from the government either to provide alternative forms of coverage or control health care and prescription costs.

Employers “have reached their limit,” said Elizabeth Mitchell, chief executive of the Purchaser Business Group on Health, an employer advocacy organization that collaborated with the Kaiser Family Foundation on the survey.

Employers, she said, “are tired of pouring tons of money into a broken health care market that delivers uneven quality at bloated costs.”

And these are the major corporations and non-profits with more than 5,000 employees. They have some leverage to negotiate with insurers and more financial wherewithal to pay for the plans. Smaller employers – if they provide health insurance at all – pay roughly the same premiums as large employers, and their workers shoulder a larger share of the cost for family plans.

Last year, employers with more than 50 workers paid $21,342 in premiums to cover employees with family plans – that’s still 50 percent more than a decade ago, despite a recent slowdown in health care inflation, according to Kaiser.

When employers’ insurance costs rise so quickly, that squeezes out money they might use for wages and other benefits. Workers are also paying more, though each employer decides how much of the added costs to pass on to workers.

In 2020, employees paid nearly $5,600 – more than a quarter – of employers’ total costs for family plans. To curb their health insurance expenses, employers increasingly are offering high-deductible plans, and the deductibles workers pay for these plans are also rising.

The major employers said in the survey that they’re open to a range of federal policies that would either cut health care costs or get the government more involved in providing health care. …Learn More

Research

September 1, 2020

Add upward mobility – an individual’s success in surpassing parents’ economic circumstances – to the factors that can keep federal disability payments in check.

A substantial body of academic research has already established that when the economy is growing, unemployed and marginally employed people have better luck on the job market, and their applications for disability insurance start to decline.

But booms and busts aren’t the only influence on disability. A new study finds that economic conditions of a different type – the ability of low-income people to move up the economic ladder – can reduce disability by improving their health. People who earn more money tend to be healthier for a variety of reasons, ranging from access to better medical care to the lower rates of depression and obesity that exist in higher-income populations.

In a recent study, Yale University sociologist Rourke O’Brien used the data from another researcher’s study that mined IRS tax records to find people born in the 1980s to parents whose incomes were at the lower end – the 25th percentile – of the U.S. income distribution. The children were followed into adulthood to see if they earn more or less than their parents did.

It’s very difficult for children in low-income families to improve on their parent’s circumstances, but the odds are better if they grow up in areas with better schools, less inequality, and more two-parent families.

O’Brien’s research found that counties in which young adults earn more, on average, than their parents were less likely to one day report having a disability in U.S. Census surveys and less likely to be receiving disability benefits.

In a more in-depth analysis, the researcher found some evidence that upward mobility also blunts the well-known tendency of rising unemployment to increase disability applications.

Taken together, the findings indicate that whether someone ends up on disability benefits depends, at least in part, on where they grew up. …Learn More

On the Web

December 24, 2019

Next Tuesday – New Year’s Eve – we’ll return with a list of some of our readers’ favorite blogs of 2019. Our regular featured articles will resume Thursday, Jan. 2.

Thank you for reading and posting comments on our retirement and personal finance blog. We hope you’ll continue to be involved in the new year. …
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October 24, 2019

Reforms to Medicare Part D under the Affordable Care Act brought significant relief to retirees by reducing the share of medication costs they must pay out of their own pockets.

But with the healthcare reform now nearly a decade old, other developments have taken over that will drive up drug costs for the most vulnerable retirees – the biggest users of expensive brand name drugs. Although only a few million people will be affected, they are already saddled with the highest spending burden.

This vulnerable group could get some help from Congress. There is bipartisan support for placing an absolute limit on how much Part D policyholders must pay in total for their prescriptions, said Juliette Cubanski, associate director of the Medicare policy program at the Kaiser Family Foundation.

“That’s a positive development,” she said, “but there are also several areas of disagreement in the legislation being considered on the House and Senate sides.”

Under the Affordable Care Act (ACA), retirees are required to pay 25 percent of their total drug costs up to the annual threshold that qualifies them for catastrophic coverage – this dollar threshold is the total of their own payments plus the price discounts from manufacturers of brand name drugs. The upshot in 2020 for retirees is that those with the highest need could spend about $375 more out of their own pockets before they enter Part D’s less-onerous catastrophic coverage phase, according to a Kaiser analysis. And that’s just the increase for next year – their outlays will rise over the next decade.
 
Once retirees enter the catastrophic phase, they are protected, because Medicare begins picking up the vast majority of the tab. But out-of-pocket costs are rising because the ACA’s controls on the spending threshold they must cross to qualify for catastrophic coverage have ended. …Learn More