Lower-income families with high-deductible plans more likely to forgo medical procedures.
Lower-income families with high-deductible health plans were more likely to forgo or delay health care due to out-of-pocket expenses, according to Jeffrey T. Kullgren, MD, MPH, a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholar at the Philadelphia VA Medical Center and the University of Pennsylvania. “Decades of health services research have demonstrated that higher levels of cost-sharing reduce health care utilization, sometimes with greater adverse consequences for low-income patients,” the researchers wrote. “Ideally, high-deductible health plans could stimulate patients to become more sophisticated consumers, but people with low incomes have not demonstrated the same levels of engagement in managing their health care as those with higher incomes.”
