Are You Spending Half Your Income On Out Of Pocket Expenses?
Imagine spending over half of your annual income on health care services each year. The Medicare program is a program that will pay for health care services for adults 65 years of age or older, or individuals with disabilities. This health care program will pay for a portion of inpatient and outpatient services. This program typically costs a significant amount from beneficiaries. During the year 2005, beneficiaries paid $912 in deductibles for inpatient services. For outpatient services, it ran to about $110. Medicare also does not cover a lot of services such as dental care, eye glasses, hearing aids, or long term care services that might be needed.
During a more stringent look into the program, it was also discovered that Medicare did not offer coverage for a lot of needed prescription drugs. This was a much higher cost for health care coverage before Medicares Part D coverage was known. A lot of the beneficiaries had high OOP or out of pocket spending limits, and varied on a number of factors such as age, health, gender, education, and so on. 90% of the beneficiaries had to have a supplemental coverage to help alleviate the costs of Medicare. The remaining 10% did not have other coverage if they became sick leaving them with high OOP. This left them to spend $8,000 on health care services alone for the year of 2005.
As the beneficiaries became older, their spending on health care became larger. They spent almost twice as much as persons aged 65 to 69. Women paid more than men, and certain ethnicities also paid more than others. The OOP spending increased as health statuses decreased. For those beneficiaries in bad health, they had to spend more than those in good. The worse the disease or health issue the beneficiaries had, the more they had to spend in health care coverage.
Wondering where your money goes when you pay it? The largest sections of OOP spending during 2005 were for long term care facility costs, prescription drugs which at the time were not covered and medical providers that the beneficiaries went too. One third of their money went to paying the premiums on the coverage. If you think you are not paying too much for health care coverage let these figures do the talking. You should not have to spend that much money on health care coverage when it is a time of need.
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