A recent study has shown that Americans pay most attention to price when they shop for plans.
Americans have made bargain shopping into an art form, and this habit has crossed over into the effort to purchase health insurance, as the cost of premiums are among the top factors that consumers consider when they buy, according to a new survey.
Two thirds of consumers who switched plans on the insurance exchange said price was the deciding factor.
Over half of all consumers who shopped around on the exchanges but didn’t make a new health insurance purchase said that the reason they didn’t do anything was that they couldn’t find a plan that they felt was affordable. The report on the survey – which was conducted by the Commonwealth Fund – stated that “Consistent with these findings, many adults opted for a limited network of doctors and hospitals in exchange for lower premiums.”
The research actually consisted of two different surveys that were both conducted by the same organization. What they determined was that 60 percent of Americans who purchased plans on the insurance exchanges were paying $125 per month or less in premiums, while some of them weren’t paying anything.
Comparatively, that figure was 55 percent for people who receive their health plans through their employers. The leader of both Commonwealth Fund surveys, Sara Collins, explained that “The survey findings suggest that the Affordable Care Act’s premium subsidies have been effective in making the cost of marketplace coverage similar to that of employer plans for people who have been most at risk of being uninsured.”
The report on the surveys also noted that people may not realize that while the premiums for these reduced health insurance policies are cheaper, they will be paying for it later in the form of higher deductibles whenever they need to make claims. “On average, larger shares of people with marketplace plans have higher deductibles than those in employer plans,” it pointed out. Still, 70 percent of people who purchased coverage through an exchange said that their plan was either good, very good, or excellent.