Congrats, America! Two days after Tax Day, you’ve made it to... Deductible Relief Day! 🍾🎉🎊

What's that?

It’s the day where the average person with employer-based health insurance has spent enough on health expenses to finally meet their deductible.
Health insurance deductibles have been rising so rapidly (year after year after year) that the Kaiser Family Foundation (@KFF) decided to track the trend to show how severely Americans are getting ripped off (and sick).

And it’s bad:
healthsystemtracker.org/brief/deductib…
As you might guess, the Deductible Relief Day is being pushed further each year. In 2005, you had to wait until Feb 28. By 2009, you wouldn’t be popping champagne until March 18. In 2019, you had to wait even two months more than that.
As KFF noted, in '09, the avg. deductible was $533 for a single person. In '18, it was $1350.

How? The insurance industry strategy of moving all of us into high-deductible plans (one of the many gross abuses I saw first-hand at Cigna) has paid off well for my former employers.
In 2018, about 85% of covered workers were enrolled in a high-deductible plan, up from just 50% ten years earlier.

Another way of looking at this: Average enrollee spending on deductibles more than tripled between 2007 and 2017.
And KFF didn't look at people who buy their coverage on their own through the ACA exchanges. They're in even *worse* shape.

@commonwealthfnd found that 40% of people in ACA plans are underinsured b/c of high out-of-pocket charges – and many likely never meet their deductibles.
As a result, millions of Americans are not going to the doctor or picking up prescriptions. Insurers LOVE that. It's far fewer claims to pay! It’s why, when many other businesses went belly up during COVID-19, insurers made record profits: medical treatment was less accessible!
.@POTUS, are you paying attention to this? You must. Millions of people WITH insurance who voted for you, including folks on Obamacare, CAN’T USE IT b/c of deductibles!

Insurers can charge families up to $7,200 before they’ll pay a dime. It keeps going up. Every. Single. Year.
No wonder more and more Americans with insurance are turning to GoFundMe or bankruptcy court.

It’s not just the premiums you gotta worry about, Joe. Deductibles are eating us alive. You and Congress need to pay attention before NO Americans can meet their deductibles.

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More from @wendellpotter

29 Apr
In last night's speech by @POTUS, something stood out to me that was overlooked by many pundits: the president spoke of the NEED to fix sky-high health insurance deductibles immediately. It's not the sexiest topic, but here's why it matters:
Many think that the only ones suffering in this health care system are those without insurance. They're struggling big time, but know who else is? People with BAD insurance. The fact is, millions of Americans can’t use their coverage because their deductibles are so damn high.
These millions of Americans with bad plans don't go to the doctor or get the care they need, like cancer treatments that could save their lives. Why? Because they don’t have enough money to cover their deductible: the amount you have to pay out of pocket before coverage kicks in.
Read 7 tweets
19 Apr
Get this, my former health insurance industry colleagues are trying to intimidate lawmakers again - this time in Connecticut - because the state government has the gall to consider a public health plan that could compromise some of the industry’s massive profits. It's despicable.
If I were still in my old job as head of comms at Cigna, I bet I would have had to write a self-serving letter to Connecticut’s governor – signed by the country’s biggest insurer CEOs – implying that they'd consider taking jobs out of the state if they don’t get their way.
And that’s just what happened. The PR chiefs of those companies wrote to CT’s governor & tried to intimidate him. This is the kind of stuff that made me leave the industry & become a whistleblower. I couldn't stomach misleading Americans so a few rich people could get even richer Image
Read 9 tweets
15 Apr
Democrats are not yet on the same page about what health care reform proposals to include in their infrastructure bill. As a former health insurance executive, I’ve got a suggestion: lower deductibles and co-pays. And do it fast.
Some Democrats seem to be turning a blind eye to the fact millions of Americans WITH INSURANCE can’t use it anymore.
A favorite campaign talking point last year was that 150 million Americans have private insurance and don’t want to lose it. What most politicians avoided saying is that more and more of those Americans can’t use their insurance.
Read 11 tweets
9 Apr
The only reason you’re seeing this Tweet by me is because of a man named Stan Brock – whose work inspired me to leave my old job as an insurance executive.

Few people in my life have been as consequential as Stan. And he’s been even more consequential to thousands of others.
A remarkable movie about him has just been released, and I hope you’ll watch it.

"Medicine Man: The Stan Brock Story" is screening nationwide til April 20 as part of the Cleveland International Film Festival @CIFF and it’s in competition for the festival’s Global Health Prize.
Stan, who starred in the popular TV series Wild Kingdom when I was a kid, went on to found Remote Area Medical in the ‘80s to fly doctors to remote parts of the globe. He was shocked when folks from the US started begging him to bring free medical care to their communities.
Read 9 tweets
23 Mar
10 years ago today, on the 1st anniversary of the Affordable Care Act, I wrote about the good things the law did, but stressed that we needed to view it as only the *starting* point of a journey toward needed reform.

Unfortunately, we have not made much progress on that journey.
Although ~20 million now have health insurance as a result of the law, a huge growing percent can’t use that insurance to get the care they need. That’s because Congress & the Obama admin were too focused on premiums... exactly what the insurance industry wanted them to focus on!
Focusing on premiums meant that Dems gave scant attention to how insurers would pick Americans’ pockets by jacking up *deductibles* year after year. In fact, deductibles are patients’ biggest struggle now, more than having enough doctors in-network, or even the price of premiums.
Read 10 tweets
4 Mar
As a former health insurance exec who quit the business, let me tell you: No one will be more excited about the new COVID package than my old friends in the corporate insurance industry. It would funnel $48 billion of taxpayer $ to them, after their most profitable year to date.
The COVID bill would temporarily pay for ACA marketplace plans & COBRA subsidies for people who lost their jobs and insurance. That would check off a major item on insurers’ wishlist because it guarantees payment to our wasteful system that’s burdened by 30% administrative costs.
A more economical approach? Open our existing Medicare program (with a 2% admin. cost) for the Americans hardest-hit by COVID-19. This would allow folks to access the care many desperately need without Uncle Sam (you) footing a bloated bill.
Read 4 tweets

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