Hospital bad debt rose in 2018 after several years of decline, and according to Moody’s, high-deductible health insurance is one of the major drivers of that increase.
According to the bond rating agency, non-profit hospitals are seeing growing amounts of bad debt as they struggle, often unsuccessfully, to collect from patients whose high deductibles leave them on the hook for meaningful amounts of care.
Kaiser Health News reports that 28 percent of covered workers, nearly half of them working for companies with fewer than 200 employees, now have health plan deductibles of at least $2000. That proportion of individuals with such high deductibles has nearly quadrupled in the last decade.
Learn more about the bad debt challenge facing hospitals in the Healthcare Dive article “Nonprofit bad debt climbs again amid steeper deductibles, Moody’s says.”