Often the high deductible options do financially make sense if you are in a place where spending the deductible each year isn’t a burden. They can even be advantageous if you are healthy; in that scenario they are essentially “hedging your bets”. You can save a substantial amount over a ppo if your utilization is low and typically if you just spend to the deductible the cost is about the same.

It’s the coinsurance afterward that can be a killer, especially if you have a chronic illness that requires a lot of expensive stuff. A PPO caps everything at a copay amount (which, tbf, can sometimes be quite high), but coinsurance can be 10-30% sometimes (maybe higher but that’s the highest I’ve seen). And if you have cancer, or some other nasty thing that requires expensive scans, medications, bloodwork, etc, paying 10-30% of the bill is still a shitload of cash. Thankfully there’s still an out of pocket max but that’s often quite high

And tbh I took your statement as judgey. I’m glad it wasn’t, thanks for clarifying. But that’s one of the issues with such a system. My colleagues who don’t do what I do are absolutely judged. But at the same time I do not judge them (usually, lol). This is not a sustainable setup. It is not sustainable to ask individual practitioners to take on the financial burden. It harms the relationship between practitioner and client, it’s destructive and can breed resentment. It results in quality of life issues for practitioners like wildly unpredictable pay. I could go on.

Ideally we would just be paid an actual salary, an actual living wage, with benefits, to work with a set number of clients, but with the current system this is functionally impossible. If we had a single payer system this would be easily feasible, all healthcare staff could be government employees basically. Good luck getting most doctors to support this though. They love padding billing under the current system