2015-01-15nytimes.com

Commonwealth also found that, over all, even people who had insurance before 2014 were having fewer problems with medical bills than they were before. That change may reflect rules in the health law that require individual insurance plans to cover a minimum set of benefits for every customer.

There is another trend cutting against those improving financial protections for individuals. Employers are increasingly asking their workers to pay deductibles and other fees when they seek health care, and several recent surveys have shown that the average size of those deductibles and fees is rising. A recent national poll from The New York Times and CBS News found that 33 percent of people said that their out-of-pocket costs had "gone up a lot."''

As the second paragraph points out, the increased costs on businesses (and general economic distress) are so severe that the benefit may be "clawed back". Of course, now the government is absorbing increased medical costs to some extent, so that will always take something off household balance sheets and put it on the public fisc.



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