If your employer is sticking you with a bigger share of the medical bill before health insurance kicks in, you may have to get used to it.
More companies are making workers pay an annual deductible or increasing the amount they must spend before insurance starts covering most care, according to a survey released Wednesday by the Kaiser Family Foundation. Annual deductibles for single coverage have now climbed about eight times as fast as wages over the last decade.
That means that those who use the health care system are pouring more of their take-home pay into medical bills even though they have coverage.
Health benefits experts say they see few signs that these rising deductibles will level off anytime soon for employer-sponsored benefits.
“At some point they have to come down to Earth, we just don’t know what point that is,” said Matthew Rae, a Kaiser senior health policy analyst.