I talk to a lot of people about their experiences using our healthcare system, and many of the complaints I hear are from people who have health insurance but are still scrambling to cover their healthcare bills. Their share of the premiums alone costs more than a family vacation, and then they’re faced with rising deductibles, copayments, and, increasingly, limits on coverage for various services on top of that. What good is having insurance, they wonder, if they’re saddled with serious bills when they get sick? A new study reports that the number of people who are ‘underinsured’ has grown 60 percent in the past four years, to 25 million. Middle- and upper-income families make up the fastest-growing share of this group; rates for those with incomes of $40,000 or more nearly tripled, to 11 percent. Families with incomes under the poverty level (about $20,000), however, had the highest rate of underinsurance, 31 percent. ‘Underinsured’ can be defined in many ways, of course. For this study, published this week in the online version of the journal Health Affairs, researchers at the Commonwealth Fund included people who spent 10 percent or more of their income on medical expenses (or […]