Junk health plans

http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/magazine/2012/03/junk-health-insurance/index.htm

Consumer Reports, which also destroys that story. They take a look at the Florida woman’s cancelled health policy and compare it to what she could—affordably—get by shopping on the exchange.

Barrette’s expiring policy is a textbook example of a junk plan that isn’t real health insurance at all. If she had ever tried to use it for anything more than an occasional doctor visit or inexpensive prescription, she would have ended up with tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of medical debt. […]”She’s paying $650 a year to be uninsured,” Karen Pollitz, an insurance expert at the nonprofit Kaiser Family Foundation, said. “I have to assume that she never really had to make much of a claim under this policy. She would have lost the house she’s sitting in if something serious had happened. I don’t know if she knows that.” […]

Okay, but can’t we be outraged that Ms. Barrette will have to fork over $591 a month for a replacement plan? Actually, no, because she has other and better options than the costly plan Blue Cross Blue Shield wants to put her in. She [can] get real insurance that covers all essential health benefits for well under $200 a month. […]

To put these two plans in perspective, let’s imagine that Ms. Barrette’s luck runs out and she receives a diagnosis of breast cancer that will cost $120,000 to treat.

Under her current junk plan, she would probably receive no more than a few hundred dollars of benefits for doctor visits and drugs.  It wouldn’t cover her surgery, her chemotherapy, her many expensive medications, or the repeated diagnostic tests she’d likely require. She would end up with probably $119,000 of unpaid medical bills. With the Humana plan, those bills top out at $6,300 a year, no matter what.