I feel sick...

CJR:

Higher deductibles and co-payments and skimpier benefits have become the new coin of the realm in the insurance world, and people are writing their own checks for medical care once covered by insurance.

NYT:

The economic slowdown has swelled the ranks of people without health insurance. But now it is also threatening millions of people who have insurance but find that the coverage is too limited or that they cannot afford their own share of medical costs.

[snip]

It just keeps eating into people’s income,” said James Corbin, a former union official who works for the local utility in Tucson.

Mr. Corbin said that under their employer’s health plan, he and his co-workers are now obliged to pay up to $4,000 of their families’ annual medical bills, on top of about $1,600 a year in premiums. Five years ago, they paid no premiums and were responsible for only about $2,000 of their families’ medical bills.

“That’s a big jump,” Mr. Corbin said. “You’ve just lost a month’s pay.”

USAToday:

Is a little coverage that much better than none at all?

Often called "limited medical benefit plans," the policies can cost far less than traditional insurance. But they cap what insurers will pay toward medical care, with the skimpiest plans covering as little as $1,000 a year. Some have daily caps, such as paying a few hundred dollars a day toward hospital coverage. Traditional insurance, by contrast, generally covers most medical expenses in a given year, after deductibles and co-payments.

Insurers say limited-benefit policies — once mainly sold to the self-employed or others who buy their own insurance — are gaining interest among employers with low-wage, part-time or contract workers. National companies such as McDonald's, the Hair Cuttery salons and Friendly's restaurants offer such coverage to their workers, as do many smaller businesses.

and CJR again (commenting on a weak interview by Fortune magazine of Aetna CEO Ron Williams:

Williams, for instance, compares uninsured Americans to bank robbers. No kidding:

Today we all pay for the uninsured. If an individual sticks up a bank and walks off with $25,000, there are consequences. If someone who really could have had an insurance policy consumes $25,000 worth of health care, everyone else pays for that.

[snip]

Forty-seven million Americans are uninsured. And Williams dismisses 30 to 33 million of them as easy to cover without any tax credits or subsidies: people who are eligible for
government coverage but haven’t signed up, college kids, non-citizens here legally, and
people with household incomes over $75,000.

How would these people get coverage? Williams doesn’t say, and, of course, Fortune doesn’t ask. But the implication that with the poor covered by the government every one else can afford to pay for themselves is flatly false.

Take a look at Aetna’s own price list. Aetna’s policy for individual family coverage in New York City costs more than—get this—$33,000 a year.

So a salary of $75,000—which, by the way, is well over the city’s median income —isn’t going to get it done, is it, Fortune?

....