New Health Care Law Limits How Much You’ll Pay Out of Pocket
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iStock/Thinkstock(NEW YORK) — Getting diagnosed with a serious illness can be devastating, not only for you and your family, but also for your family’s finances.
But under the new health care law, there are restrictions on how much you’ll have to pay, as Dr. Karen Pollitz with the Kaiser Family Foundation points out.
“Once you’ve spent, out of pocket, $6,350 on deductibles, co-pays, co-insurance, the rest of your covered services need to be covered 100 percent for the remainder of the year. …That’s per person. Double that for family coverage,” she says.
Insurance companies are also no longer allowed to set maximum lifetime payout limits.
Emory University’s Dr. Ken Thorpe says the idea is to stop the risk of going bankrupt when someone in your family needs ongoing treatment for a major illness.
“The insurance payments don’t suddenly stop when you hit lets say a million-dollar payout. So those have been eliminated,” Thorpe says.
Those new rules kick in next year.
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