Friday, February 10, 2017

Obamacare: Doctor Avoids Own ER Visit Due to Huge Deductible, Plus Bernie's Admission



...All the doctor’s tricks were failing him. He’d tried neck massage, pressure to the eyes, ice on the face. But an hour in, Ashish Jha still couldn’t slow his racing heart. His wife asked what he’d recommend if a patient called with the same problem. “I said, ‘Oh, that’s easy.’ Go to the emergency department.” As a physician, Jha knew that this tachycardia could lead to a heart attack. Yet he felt caught by a decision he’d made in enrolling his family in a high-deductible insurance plan. Such plans, which offer lower premiums in exchange for higher out-of-pocket expenses, are an increasingly common type of coverage for millions of Americans. The Harvard University health-policy researcher had chosen his — with its $6,000 deductible — as a kind of personal experiment in better understanding how that trade-off influences health. And now, when faced with the prospect of paying thousands of dollars for an emergency-room visit, Jha stayed home. “I should have gone to the hospital,” he said recently. But “I knew there was a big bill waiting for me if I did, and I rolled the dice.”...







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