Health Insurance Consumer Information

Karen Pollitz, Project Director of the Health Policy Institute at Georgetown University, spoke to USA Today about a new set of high-deductible health care plans being offered by United Healthcare and others.

These plans offer financial incentives, in the form of significantly lower deductibles, for enrollees who submit to health tests that show they fall into generally healthy standards. This is advertised as promoting healthy lifestyles which in turn can lower illness rates in some categories. But do the damaging consequences to privacy and potential discrimination against the less-than-healthy, outweigh the benefits?

“A key protection in the Americans with Disabilities Act is that your employer can’t discriminate against you based on health status,” says Karen Pollitz at the Georgetown University Health Policy Institute. “They can’t even ask about your health, with the only exception being if they ask through a voluntary program. You could argue that this program is not voluntary.”

Read the story at the USA Today website: Plan bases deductible on health tests, sees costs fall.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 12th, 2007 at 12:32 pm and is filed under In the News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.