Over the past decade, Samaritan Health Services has had a rare view of the changing fortunes, not just clinical but financial, of many patients.
While the vast majority of patients have health insurance, high deductible health plans (HDHPs) can call for deductibles as high as $6,550 for individuals and $13,100 for families annually, per recent national figures. Most patients can’t afford to pay medical expenses at these levels outright — and require financial assistance or payment plans to pay them off at all.
At Samaritan, the number of hospital patients who used financing nearly doubled between 2013 and 2014, while those using it for physician bills surged by one-third. From 2013 to 2016 alone, deductibles rose 151 percent while copayments grew by 104 percent among Samaritan’s populations.