Dr. Oz, Administrator for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, plans to lower medical costs: How it will affect you

The cost of healthcare in the United States is nearly three times the average in other OECD countries at almost $15,000 per person, and it’s been rising at fast clip. The Trump administration has put forth policies to try and reverse that upward trend.

These include asking Congress to pass legislation to codify his most favored nation drug pricing policy and creating a new healthcare insurance plan. The latter would be a type of plan known as a catastrophic or skinny policy. However, experts in healthcare have raised concerns that despite lower premiums they may end up costing Americans more.

How plans to lower medical costs will affect you

The new proposal was envisioned under the Affordable Care Act (ACA), also known as Obamacare, but has been seen as a last resort for those who could not afford healthcare coverage. Americans have mostly rejected these kinds of plans as they aren’t that much cheaper than Obamacare bronze plans, which are currently those with the highest out-of-pocket costs that are eligible for subsidies.

Under this catastrophic plan proposed, the annual deductible for an individual would be more than $15,000 and for a family, $31,000. For an individual, that would be eight times the average deductible that a person with job-based insurance has to shell out.

“Nobody wants that product. It’s going to be a really cheap product that nobody wants,” Amitabh Chandra, a Harvard health economist and expert on high-deductible plans told The New York Times earlier this year.

Another concern is that they could be used as a benchmark for setting the level of subsidies in any given marketplace, which would result in people who want traditional plans having to pay more as subsidies would be lowered.

Lower prescription prices will lead to healthier Americans and save money

On the other hand, the administration’s plans to bring down the cost of drugs by forcing pharmaceutical companies to lower prescription medication prices to the same level or lower than the lowest price they charge in other countries would have knock-on savings beyond just the price consumers pay according to Dr. Mehmet Oz.

“It saves our country money,” he told NewsNation this week. He said that one in three Americans currently leave the pharmacy without the medications their doctor has prescribed them to treat their ailment because of high costs.

If people can afford their meds, then they will get healthier and that will reduce complications that arise from their ailment Dr. Oz explained. That in turn means they will need fewer additional treatments thus saving the healthcare system money.

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