People with poor of fair mental health faced the highest challenges with their coverage.
Over half of insured adults in the United States are facing struggles with their health insurance, according to a recent Kaiser Family Foundation survey.
The survey results showed struggles in everything from payment discrepancies to limited mental healthcare coverage.
The online survey was conducted this year between February 21 and March 14. It involved the participation of 3,605 adults who are covered by employer-sponsored health insurance plans, Medicaid, Medicare, a Military plan, or Affordable Care Act (ACA) marketplace plans.
Among the respondents, about eight out of ten said that they would consider their plans to be “good” or “excellent”. The positive ratings occurred most often among those covered by Medicare, including individuals who were enrolled in traditional Medicare and Medicare advantage plans.
Adults with coverage but who rated their physical health as being “fair” or “poor” had the greatest likelihood of giving a negative rating to their plans.
Even after giving a positive rating, over half of the respondents were facing health insurance problems.
Even though the majority of the survey respondents gave their plans a positive rating, almost 60 percent of the respondents reported having faced a problem with their plan within the last year.
About that same percentage of people – 60 percent with employer-sponsored coverage, 58 percent covered by Medicaid, and 56 percent covered by an ACA marketplace plan – said that they were experiencing problems with their plans. Just slightly more than half of Medicare beneficiaries faced similar struggles.
Problems were varied
There were many different types of problem reported by the survey respondents, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation report on the results.
Nearly 30 percent of adults said that they had experienced an instance when their heath insurance plan had paid them less than what they had expected for a medical bill. Another 18 percent said they’d experienced an instance when they’d believed they were covered for an expense, but their insurer didn’t pay for it. Respondents with Medicaid or Medicare were least likely to have experienced those types of medical expense payment issues.
