How health care costs squeezing the middle class

USA Today -  A recent Commonwealth Fund survey found that four in 10 working-age adults skipped some kind of care because of the cost, and other surveys have found much the same. The portion of workers with annual deductibles — what consumers must pay before insurance kicks in — rose from 55% eight years ago to 80% today, according to research by the Kaiser Family Foundation. And a Mercer study showed that 2014 saw the largest one-year increase in enrollment in "high-deductible plans" — from 18% to 23% of all covered employees.

Meanwhile the size of the average deductible more than doubled in eight years, from $584 to $1,217 for individual coverage. Add to this co-pays, co-insurance and the price of drugs or procedures not covered by plans — and it's all too much for many Americans....

Inpatient care last year averaged $17,553, and insurance plans require people to pay a portion of that even after meeting their deductibles, up to an out-of-pocket maximum that can easily exceed $10,000 a year for families. Median household income in the U.S. is around $53,000, and the average American has less than $6,000 in savings, according to a 2012 report by Pitney-Bowes Software. A quarter have no emergency savings at all, Bankrate.com reported in June.

"Health expenses tend to come up unexpectedly, or if you have a chronic condition, they come up relentlessly," adds Karen Pollitz, a senior fellow at Kaiser. "People put off care or they split their pills. They do without."

Mounting evidence backs that up:

• Nearly 30% of privately insured, working-age Americans with deductibles of at least 5% of their income had a medical problem but didn't go to the doctor, the Commonwealth Fund found. Around the same percentage skipped doctor-recommended medical tests, treatments or follow-ups.

• Nearly half of middle-class workers skipped health care services or fell into financial hardship because of health expenses, according to a survey by the Associated Press and NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

• Use of hospital care among insured workers has been dropping since 2010, and use of outpatient care, such as doctor visits, dropped slightly for the first time from 2012 to 2013, according to insurance claim data analyzed by the Health Care Cost Institute.

• Medical professionals across the USA see the reality behind the research. The Arlas' patient load used to be 45% commercially insured and 25% Medicaid; those percentages are now reversed. Stan Brock, founder of Remote Area Medical, which runs free clinics around the nation, says the group's volunteer workers found that around 7% of patients who came to one of the clinics had job-provided insurance — and some waited for days just to keep a prime spot in line.