The heuristics that people use result in them selecting overly expensive plans that that end up costing them quite a bit. A lot of people are basing theirYOGITA TULSIAN: WHAT AN INSPIRING ‘ENTREPRENEUR’ LEAVING FOOTPRINTS IN HR REALM decisions on the absolute numbers they're seeing presented to them, rather than calculating their financial risk with each plan. One challenge that I think people have is that while plan choice really should be about your0 health risk and your willingness to take on financial risks, I think a lot of people, they look at more expensive plans they see more expensive plans as being better, almost like choosing a hotel. Research has shed light on how to best help people determine the plan that makes the most financial sense for them. Find that showing people the consequences improves the choices that they make. The best way is to do the math and figure out how much a plan may actually cost over the course of the year based on how much health care the policyholder might need. The researchers also gave the study subjects some help choosing their plans by laying out exactly how much each plan may cost based on how much health care they use that year. We designed as this tool that allows you for every potential expenditure under each plan, how much money you actually are going to be spending over the course of the year in terms of both the premium you're going to be
spending and then also how much you're going to be on the hook for relative to how much the plan is going to help you out with. And we could show it in a graph. And you can actually see some plans are above other plans in this graph in terms of how much money you're spending overall. And the tool helps people to pick a plan that over the course of the year, they end up on average spending less money. Some employers and state run Obamacare marketplaces are beginning to provide decision aids, such that help people make the best decisions for them. If you are going to do the math yourself, take into consideration your own health risks when doing so. That means
considering the best case scenario where you may not need any care or just preventative care, and the worst case scenario where you need a lot of care. You should also be careful to check which doctors are in-network within specific policies because the doctor you go to can change costs dramatically. If you have expensive health conditions or serious health history, I'm a cancer survivor, so I have a group of doctors who I really want to keep seeing because they've saved my life a couple of times, so. So it matters to me that they're in my plan network. I can't necessarily guarantee that all of your doctors or the facilities that you go to, the treatment facilities and so forth are going to be covered. So you're really going to have to check. It's not very transparent. So, all the plans have a link to a provider directory, but you know you're going to have to kind of click into all of them. It's also
important to revisit a policy every year to see if it's still the best option that fits your needs, even if your employer hasn't made any changes to the plan. So only 20-25% of employees and employer-sponsored contexts will actually change their plan from year to year. So, if you choose a poor plan from a financial basis, then normally you stick with that plan for potentially multiple years, so it can become quite a costly choice. There are places for people to turn to get assistance If you are looking marketplace coverage anywhere. There are navigators. These are trained experts who can help you walk through the application, answer any questions. What am I supposed to fill in here and help you kind of sift through the plan choices and try to figure out how they're how they're different and which one works best for you? Picking the wrong plan means people are spending more money on health care than they have to, and the numbers show it. Health care costs in the U.S. have been rising overall due to a variety of factors, including out-of-pocket expenses for Americans.
Health care spending in the United States has gone from 6.9% of total GDP in 1970 to more than 17.5% percent as of 2019. When we are spending that amount of money on health care.
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