Say my deductible is 1500 and I need a procedure that’s costs $1000 but my insurance will cover 50% before deductible. A few months before the procedure I managed to meet my deductible though does that mean they will cover 100% of it or the 50% still?
If possible try to explain like I’m five
your scenario is either worded incorrectly or very atypical (which is very possible, there are a lot of different insurance plans in the us
typically high deductible plans work in a way of “meet your deductible and then we cover x% after that”
eg I am a therapist, I bill your insurance $100 for an hour session. You have a $1000 deductible with 80% coinsurance.
Our first 10 sessions will cost you $100 out of pocket, which goes to me directly. I submit billing for these sessions but get no reimbursement from the insurer because you have already paid the full amount. However, my submission of billing indicates to the insurer that you paid $100 for a medical service on whatever date for whatever diagnosis.
After the $1000 deductible is met your insurance splits the bill with you 80/20. Now you pay me $20 per meeting and when I submit the billing the insurance (hopefully) pays the other $80 to give me the $100 per meeting I am owed.
This of course assumes no other medical spending goes on for the duration, otherwise you would hit your deductible faster. If you saw me 3x and then had a surgery that cost $5,000, you’d pay $700 for the surgery to settle your deductible plus an additional $860 (20% of the remaining $4300) and then sessions would be $20 under the 20% coinsurance.
You should also have an out of pocket max, this is kind of similar to a deductible but it is different. This is a tally of your total spending and once you hit it your coinsurance usually drops and you pay nothing.
Also important point is that deductibles reset every plan year. This should have been made abundantly clear to you but I still encounter many who do not know this
Additionally your insurance may have certain services covered that don’t cost you anything or where the deductible doesn’t apply (eg you’d only pay 20% even if it’s the first appointment of the year). Typically this is preventative care, things like physicals and vaccinations
That is the most typical. But like I said it there are many plans and variations. It’s possible you have a plan that prior to meeting the deductible you pay 50% of billing and then have a 0% coinsurance. This would be really great insurance.
It’s also possible that you have a benefits package from your employer that is basically paying 50% of your deductible in a roundabout way. this is far more commonly done by the employer funding an hsa/fsa account which would be a payment card that you use on medical spending and not the insurer. However, I have encountered plans where the hsa and insurance were rolled together and joint companies, where the hsa would pay all or part of billing prior to deductible on the patients behalf
Using the same examples above you’d pay me $50 until you met your deductible, then nothing once the deductible is met. If you had a $1000 deductible, saw me twice, then had the 5k surgery you’d pay me $100 and $900 for the surgery. If you have one of the situations where the employer is covering 50% of the deductible it would be the same but the surgery would be $400 because ultimately you’re only paying $500 of the $1000 deductible and your employer is covering the other half. This is not a situation I’ve ever encountered
Another important point is that deductible status is dependent on your providers doing timely billing and your insurance processing said billing in a timely manner as well. This does not always happen. As a result you may meet your deductible but my billing verification shows that is not the case. The examples I used above were clean and easy but it’s never that simple. Most people have a deductible around $2500 (and many 2-4x this) and see several different healthcare services.
I submit my billing at the end of each day but some places are sloppy and will take weeks to submit. This can lead to situations where you are charged money because I was under the impression you had a deductible but you should not have been. Eventually the insurer will pay me once things sort out. If I am good at record keeping (I am great at it for this reason) I will catch the double payment and send you a refund. This is why it is important for you to keep track of deductibles and medical spending. Not all offices are managed well. I’ve personally had money stolen from me (because this is literally fraud, to not refund the double payment) and I don’t believe it was ever intentional, just offices with shitty management. Let your providers know if you’ve met your deductible. I will always hold off on charging you if you tell me this, submit billing, and see what the insurance reimburses. If they reimburse me in full then you were right. If they don’t I send you a bill and if that is incorrect you need to call your insurance to complain
You should be able to track deductible and out of pocket spending on your insurances consumer portal (eg go to Aetna.com or whatever and click “for subscribers” and make an account, if you haven’t already). This should also give you an explanation of plan details.
Most importantly you should be able to call the office of the place (or billing dept if it’s a larger health network) doing the procedure to have their office manager check what you will be expected to pay for the procedure both at time of service and expected cost total. This takes only a minute but be forewarned it is essentially an estimate and not a guarantee. Billing can change last minute depending on how the procedure goes (eg added complexity allowing them to add another cpt code for something)
There’s a lot more to it than this unfortunately. Some plans have tiered deductibles, sometimes a staff member in a hospital isn’t personally enrolled and then are considered “out of network”, which is a whole other thing, sometimes you are still responsible for a certain services that the provider requires but the insurance refuses to pay. That last point especially: every time you establish with a medical office or get a procedure you sign something that says you are financially responsible for services not covered by insurance (I guarantee this, every time). So if you get bloodwork with like 30 tests and 2 aren’t covered even if you’ve met your out of pocket max and have the best insurance in the world you’re getting a bill (and potentially a hefty one, some blood tests are extremely expensive)
Sorry this is very long and complex but that is kind of how insurance is? To boil it down to a “eli5” 2-3 sentence explanation would either require your specific plan information in much more detail or to overgeneralize and potentially mislead you.
God I hate I private insurance.
Yep.
My deductibles were crazy when I was in college working in fast food. Something like $8k. I was making like $30k a year.
Today, it’s like $4k. I make multipliers of that.
Before we can commence with therapy relating to your suspected anxiety, adhd and trauma relating to people consistently extracting large amounts of time and money from you whilst making complicated, conditional, arbitrarily changing promises (involving the complicated, conditional, arbitrarily changing views of multiple third parties you do not personally know) to repay you in some way, which they never do…
… please allow me to trigger all of your suspected conditions as thoroughly as possible in the name of ethical transparency and consent before we can proceed.
Don’t worry this will only take 15 minutes to explain adequately if you’re in a good headspace.
…
Subject appears irrationally angry and violent for no discernible reason, suspicion of psychosis.
one of the most frustrating aspects of being a therapist in america in the past 10 years is the hand waving of the ethics involved in the financial renumeration of our relationship with those we serve
I would say a significant stressor for the overwhelming majority of the clients I have is financial woes. And because the system is backwards, those with high paying jobs well into their career tend to have the fancy PPO plans with no deductible where seeing me (or anyone) is only $10 despite the fact that they could much more easily afford a 5-10k deductible. Meanwhile the people who are making 20-50k a year on the other end of the spectrum almost always have those high deductible plans with sometimes massive deductibles and rarely have employer funded hsa.
I’m not an idiot, I run my own practice and I do the books for it. I can do the math to figure out how much take home pay someone has with those salaries. I can also conceptualize the cost of housing, food, phone, transportation, etc because I am also paying these things. So when I meet someone here and their appointments are $140 per meeting I am in a tough spot. I am asking them to take on a burden of $560 per month (assuming weekly sessions). That’s immense. And if the deductible is 5k, 7.5k, 10k, it will take ages to meet especially if they’re younger and not really making contact with many other medical providers.
I am contractually obligated to charge what your insurance pays me in these instances. If your insurance pays me $140 for the hour I have to charge you that until you hit the deductible. I could be dropped from the network if I modify this for you and get caught.
I can ask you to skip using your insurance and charge a lower out of pocket rate but this is complex. For one, many therapists can’t adjust their rate much lower. I have flexibility here because my practice is entirely telehealth so my overheads are much lower. But if you see them in an office? They are paying about 40-50% of that just in rent most places.
Additionally even with telehealth I have to be careful with adjusting rates. Insurance only pays me for specific timed and coded sessions. If you and I have a phone call for 25 minutes? Not covered. If you ask me to collaborate with your psychiatrist and I talk to them for 40 minutes? Not covered. The time I spend dealing with billing and this system, which works out to an average of 20-30 minutes per session? Not covered. So the 25% of my week doing billing shit and the overtime hours doing phone check ins, case collabs, etc. has to be covered by that.
This is why many therapists give fee schedules and charge you for all of these things. If you want paperwork from them it’s $1 a page, phone calls are $75/hr, etc. I can make it work without this because I’m not paying for office space but if I was I would need to do this to keep myself afloat.
This is also part of why many, many therapists simply don’t take insurance anymore. Just pay me the $140 directly. I can collect it via square or whatever and your billing is done. I no longer spend 5-10 hours a week on billing nonsense like fighting retracted payments, finding out why claims were denied, etc. You can submit receipts for out of network reimbursement and you deal with them.
I understand why my peers do what they do. But ethically it’s a mess. I signed up to help people and what I have become is a gigantic cash sink that puts a tremendous amount of pressure on the people I serve and is counterproductive to our work.
At the same time I deserve a fair salary for my work and this is the only way to get it. And if I protest the system by leaving it because it’s so broken then the end result is that there’s 1 less mental health provider who takes insurance. If I stop taking insurance altogether I alienate a ton of people with high need who can’t afford to pay out of pocket forever and/or don’t know how to navigate out of network reimbursement.
I cannot tell you how many times I do a screening call with someone and they say “this sounds like what I need”, they tentatively schedule, and then once I run their insurance and give them the actual numbers of what treatment will cost they simply ghost. It is a system that actively deters people from seeking assistance because it is so cost prohibitive
And the insurance lobby has its fingers so deep into the framework of america that this will simply never be fixed. It will only be changed. Look at Kamala Harris’ proposed Medicare for all: it still allows private plans. That will be a movement in the right direction because it will end the idea of someone being “uninsured”, which is great, but it will also create a two lane system in which many practitioners will do whatever they can to avoid taking basic Medicare patients in favor of the commercial plans. Commercial plans, at least in my area, simply pay more. Significantly more. Like $80/hr vs $140/hr. And in the end I will have the same problems because the unnecessarily complex private insurance system will still exist and be very powerful. I will just have one more insurer to add to the web of complexity. But no politician will ever remove the private health insurance industry. To do so would alleviate so much spending waste, so many wasted administrative dollars and man hours, but it would also result in layoffs of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of americans whose jobs rely on processing the complex bullshit of this system
So basically my job covers 50% I guess since I think taht’s why I’m charged 50% of the cost before deductible.
Then if you’ve met your deductible the big question is if you have a coinsurance after the deductible is met and an out of pocket maximum.
If your coinsurance is 60% or 80% or whatever, you won’t be responsible for the full bill but only that percentage of it.
If you have no coinsurance (a no charge after deductible plan) the service should be covered 100%
If you have coinsurance you should have an out of pocket max, which once hit should end the coinsurance and make services covered 100%. OOP max is typically quite a bit higher than deductible, sometimes 5-7x as much, but not always. It’s plan specific.
If your employer pays 50% that is an arrangement they have worked out and the specifics will be tied to your companies contract. This could mean they would pay 50% of any bill (unlikely as this is not a fixed cost they can plan for. Maybe if you’re like a ceo or some shit) or it could mean that up to your deductible they’ll pay 50%.
Also keep in mind even if you’re in a “covered 100%” scenario there are some instances in which you would still get billed:
Differential vs contracted rates - if the hospital charges $5000 for your procedure but your insurance only pays $4600 the hospital can sometimes bill you for the difference. This is not always the case; some contracts require the servicer (doctor) to accept the contracted rates and not charge more. Most common reason you’d get a bill in the above 100% scenarios and also the reason the math might not work out in coinsurance scenarios. Eg in the above surgery example your bill would probably be $1320. It should be 920 as that is 20% of the $4600 paid, or even $1000 as that is 20% of the 5k billed, but you pay the 920 as 20% of what your insurance paid plus the $400 difference, so $1320
Out of network providers - these can often have a separate deductible and sometimes in hospitals a provider can be out of network even though the hospital itself is in network
Non covered services - if the procedure involves a service that isn’t covered (uncommon)
Billing errors: if a bill looks wrong contest it and if your insurance isn’t reimbursing providers properly complain to them. Sometimes a medical office gets your info wrong and assumes your deductible or coinsurance is active when it shouldn’t be. Sometimes your insurance makes similar mistakes.
Sorry for the unhelpful comment. But I must say. As someone fortunate enough to have lived my whole life with public health care, the length of the comments in this thread is absolutely frightening.
I wish you the best of luck.
Oath, I started reading comments and when I saw a 5 part example, that was then corrected and added to, I peaced out. No health system, private or public, should require a 1500 word essay response to “How much do I pay for this procedure?”
Terrifying. OP- I sincerely hope something changes for you guys over there because that insurance process is lunacy.
You need to know both your deductible and out of pocket maximum numbers. You’ve said your deductible is $1500. For the sake of this example let’s say your out of pocket max (OOP from now on) is $2500.
For simplicity, we’ll go with your insurance’s negotiated rate for the procedure is $1000*. Meaning at the end of the day you and your insurance combined will pay the hospital $1000.
Basically any bills up to $1500 for the year you pay 100%. Between $1500 and $2500 (or your OOP), insurance pays 50% and you pay 50%. Over $2500 insurance pays 100%.
Some examples to illustrate:
- You’ve paid $400 this year so far. You pay the full $1000: $400 + $1000 = $1400 which is less than your deductible of $1500
- You’ve paid $1000 so far this year. You pay $750 and insurance pays $250: $500 gets you to the $1500 deductible limit so you have to pay all that, plus you pay 50% of the remaining $500 bill = $250.
- You’ve paid $1700 so far. You pay $500 and insurance pays $500. $1700 + $500 = $2200 which is less than your OOP of $2500
- You’ve paid $2300 so far. You pay $200 and insurance pays $800. 50% of $1000 = $500 but $500 would put you over your OOP of $2500. $2500 - $2300 = $200. You pay $200 and insurance pays the rest.
- You’ve paid $2500 so far. Insurance pays $1000
- If your insurance’s negotiated rate for the procedure is $1000, this means that’s what the hospital and insurance have agreed to pay. A lot of times you’ll see the hospital “charge” a larger number and then have an insurance “discount” but ignore this. It doesn’t factor into deductible or out of pocket maximum calculations.
Why is this all so convoluted and, seemingly, legal? Is this purposely convoluted to obfuscate illegal activity?
I don’t know the actual answer. My theory is it’s this confusing so it’s hard for the general population to catch the mistakes. This allows insurance companies get out of paying as much as they’re supposed to. And hospitals don’t really care who does the paying, as long as they get paid
Don’t forget, insurance covers 50% before the deductible is met, not after. When a policy has that verbiage, usually there’s a footnote that states how those claims are handled in the future. From what I’ve seen, that could mean that insurance will cover 100% of said procedure after the deductible is met or it could mean a co-insurance of 30%.
After the deductible is met, OP won’t necessarily pay 50%. The percentage of the bill that OP and/or insurance will pay will be on a footnote at the bottom of the blue plan overview page (at least it’s blue when looking at plans from the ACA marketplace).
For bonus points let’s also assume that the user is 2100 away from their lifetime cap in scenario three: then instead of you and your insurer splitting the 1k bill evenly your insurer would split 800 with you (400 from each of you) before saying “peace bro im out” and leaving you with the remaining 200 dollar bill.
Additionally the user above was assuming that insurance would cover half the bill - that’s actually a variable that your personal plan might disagree with called your “coinsurance” rate, you could have a 50% coinsurance rate, an 80% rate (an awful plan) or a 0% rate which would mean you’re fully covered after you hit your deductible (assuming there aren’t any annual coverage cap shenanigans).
Also fun is out of network stuff, different plans may vary but let’s take scenario three again but assume the HCP you went to was out of network and their charge master (see parent’s footnote) says the actual raw cost of the procedure is 23,000 dollars. Your insurer might handle this in two ways:
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“get fucked” - your insurer offers no coverage at all for out of network charges - in this case the 23k bill goes against your bank account directly and you likely end up declaring bankruptcy or delinquenting on the loan.
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“get (slightly less) fucked” - your insurer looks at what you would have paid at an in network HCP and partially pays for your procedure assuming you had it done at an approved HCP. In this case your insurance pays 500 and you just need to cover the remaining 22.5k… so you once again may consider bankruptcy.
In both cases, for shits and giggles, this extreme medical cost does not count toward your OOP - except for 1000$ in the second case if partial coverage is awarded. This is why people Uber to specific hospitals after traumatic injuries.
All very valid points and part of why American health insurance is such a joke
I had an incident recently where my spouse had to go to the ER because of a life threatening incident. One of those fix it right now or they might die things. (They’re fine now, thank goodness.)
We went to an in-network hospital and all doctors were also in-network. However the one who actually did the life-saving procedure was a specialist. Under our insurance plan seeing a specialist requires a referral, which of course we didn’t have time to get. So insurance tried to nope out of that doctor’s entire bill.
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If you’ve met your deductible, you may not owe for the upcoming procedure.
However, you’d need to look at your policy or call the insurance company to see if the procedure counts towards your deductible. Normally the plan specifies that its 50% before the deductible and by an asterisk or buried somewhere in your plan’s terms, it may say that it’ll be 100% covered after tour deductible is met.
Is your deductible and out-of-pocket max the same? If you’ve met both, you may not even owe a copay. If you still haven’t met the out-of-pocket max, you will still owe co-pays.
Your plan documents or the company will be able to give better answers, as companies and plans can be very different in how they cover things.
If you’ve met the deductible for the plan year, the deductible is now off the table. And presumably you need to look at your policy to see what it covers after the deductible is met.
“50% before deductible” is an odd term that I haven’t seen in an health insurance policy. Usually, coinsurance doesn’t kick in until after the deductible is met.
Wouldn’t coverage apply once the bill is submitted?
I think they aren’t “covering” 50% before deductible, but negotiating a 50% lower cost.
Short answer: They will cover 50%.
Long answer: They won’t cover anything until you’ve met your deductible. Once you’ve paid out $1,500 (your deductible), they will start covering 50% of the remaining cost.
