Health insurance is supposed to offer protection — both medically and financially. But as it turns out, an estimated three-quarters of people who are pushed into personal bankruptcy by medical problems actually had insurance when they got sick or were injured.
And so, even as Washington tries to cover the tens of millions of Americans without medical insurance, many health policy experts say simply giving everyone an insurance card will not be ...
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Posted by Fabrice Florin
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An eye-opening story. The reporter focuses on the underinsured population, who have insurance which often doesn't cover the health care they believe they're paying for. At times, the piece doesn't include enough larger factual context to make the big picture clear; it lacks meaningful statistics. Still, it sheds light on another huge shortfall of U.S. health care insurance coverage
“Underinsurance is the great hidden risk of the American health care system,” said Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard law professor who has analyzed medical bankruptcies. “People do not realize they are one diagnosis away from financial collapse.”
He and the hospital say they were surprised to eventually learn that the $150,000 hospital coverage in the Aetna policy was mainly for room and board. Coverage was capped at $10,000 for “other hospital services,” which turned out to include nearly all routine hospital care — the expenses incurred in the operating room, for example, and the cost of any medication he received.
In other words, Aetna would have paid for Mr. Yurdin to stay in the hospital for more than five months — as long as he did not need an operation or any lab tests or drugs while he was there.
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Professor Elizabeth Warren is a noted expert on this topic, where law and health care meet.