How Obamacare Has Lowered Your Out-of-Pocket Expenses

• Researchers say the Affordable Care Act has helped ease the out-of-pocket expenses for healthcare services.
• Prescription drug prices are among the medical expenses that have been substantially affected.
• Experts note that the expansion of Medicaid programs has also helped.

The Affordable Care Act (ACA), also known as Obamacare, has substantially increased health insurance coverage in the United States.

It also seems to have helped reduce the amount of money Americans have had to pull out of their wallet to pay for healthcare, a new study finds.

Dr. Sara Collins, vice president for healthcare coverage and access at The Commonwealth Fund, which studies the ACA and other health policy, told Healthline that the findings are a “partial success story” for the healthcare reform bill championed by former President Barack Obama.

“The ACA did reduce out-of-pocket expenses, but the data still show that they still are increasing every year, so work still needs to be done” to stop insurers from keeping healthcare premium growth lower by raising deductibles, said Collins.

Limiting out-of-pocket health expenses was one of the major goals of the ACA, which was enacted in 2010.

To see how effective the law was in achieving that goal, researchers from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland, looked at 2 decades worth of data on healthcare expenses.

They focused on expenses known to be more frequently paid by patients rather than insurers. These included physician services, dental services, nonprescription medications, and prescription medications.

In the study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, researchers reported that while per capita out-of-pocket healthcare spending increased between 2000 and 2018 from $1,028 to $1,148, the average annual growth rate of such spending significantly decreased following passage of the ACA.

And while total per capita health expenditures increased from $6,649 to $10,627 in the same time period, “compared with the pre-ACA period, out of pocket spending increased at a slower rate for almost all healthcare services during the post-ACA period,” the researchers found.

“We speculate that ACA-imposed spending limits for [high-deductible health plans] account for substantial [out-of-pocket] savings,” the researchers wrote. “Furthermore, access to coverage for individuals who were previously uninsured may account for additional [out-of-pocket] savings.”

Collins said that the ACA also likely reduced out-of-pocket spending simply by giving health insurance coverage to uninsured people who otherwise would have had to cover the entire cost of care for themselves.