How well-equipped are America's uninsured to shop for private health insurance in the ACA's marketplace?
The scary news going in was that most of the target population had a poor grasp of fundamental insurance concepts such as "deductible" and "copay." The good news is that most buyers seem to have picked up a working knowledge of the basic tradeoff between monthly premiums and likely out-of-pocket costs by the time they pulled the trigger.
I have noted in multiple posts, summarized here, that the vast majority of lower-income ACA shoppers avoided high deductible bronze plans and availed themselves of the Cost Sharing Reduction (CSR) subsidies available only with silver plans -- even when, as in Mississippi, the silver plans cost them significantly more per month. Now, Kaiser Family Foundation survey data, reported this week, suggest that private plan buyers considered deductibles and co-pays almost as important as monthly premiums.
The scary news going in was that most of the target population had a poor grasp of fundamental insurance concepts such as "deductible" and "copay." The good news is that most buyers seem to have picked up a working knowledge of the basic tradeoff between monthly premiums and likely out-of-pocket costs by the time they pulled the trigger.
I have noted in multiple posts, summarized here, that the vast majority of lower-income ACA shoppers avoided high deductible bronze plans and availed themselves of the Cost Sharing Reduction (CSR) subsidies available only with silver plans -- even when, as in Mississippi, the silver plans cost them significantly more per month. Now, Kaiser Family Foundation survey data, reported this week, suggest that private plan buyers considered deductibles and co-pays almost as important as monthly premiums.
