Rising health care costs burden families

SALT LAKE CITY — As health insurance costs continue to rise, many employers are cutting back on the coverage they provide, according to NPR.

"Deductibles have gone up. Co-pays have gone up. You see cost-sharing for out-of-network services (has) gone up," Paul Fronstin of the Employee Benefit Research Institute told NPR. "It seems to have accelerated in the last few years. Health care is just continuing to take a bigger bite out of take-home pay."

That means that even if people have health insurance, they'll end up paying thousands of dollars before their insurance coverage starts to contribute, according to the article. When the insurance policy does kick in, it will cover even less than it used to.

Some Americans are having trouble getting their insurance to pay or their health care. More than 1 in 5 Americans had a hard time getting their health insurance to cover medical costs in the past year, according to a recent NPR poll.

"This affects not only how people seek health care — they're more reluctant to get it if they can put it off. But it also affects family budgets in a very real way, especially as we're still coming out of recession and families are still crunched by a weak economy," Drew Altman, president and CEO of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a private, nonprofit, nonpartisan research group, told NPR.

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