Summary: “A type of pain that hospitals thought they had relieved has come back with a vengeance: it’s called bad debt. Hospitals have long struggled to collect bills when patients aren’t covered by insurance — creating delinquent accounts,” John Lauerman writes over at Bloomberg Business. “The Affordable Care Act was supposed to relieve some of that strain by helping pay for coverage for millions of Americans and expanding Medicaid in some states to cover the poor. Yet while millions of people have gained coverage since Obamacare became law in 2010, there’s also been an increase in insurance that comes with high deductibles and cost-sharing. Under those plans, the first few thousand dollars of annual medical expenses come out of patients’ wallets. That’s money that hospitals like Childress Regional Medical Center in the Texas Panhandle region are unlikely to collect. ‘It feels like a sucker punch,’ said John Henderson, the nonprofit hospital’s chief executive. ‘When someone has a really high deductible, effectively they’re still uninsured, and most people in Childress don’t have $5,000 lying around to pay their bills.’ The rate of uninsurance in the U.S. has fallen to 9.1 percent from 15.7 percent in 2009. Yet in the first nine months of 2015, about 36 percent of the U.S. insured were covered by high-deductible or consumer-directed health plans that can require considerable out-of-pocket payments, compared with about 25 percent in 2010, according to a CDC survey.” John Lauerman, “Bad Debt Is the Pain Hospitals Can’t Heal as Patients Don’t Pay,” Bloomberg Business.
