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Show I Health Insurance Benefits Top $3 Billion Per Cent of Total Health Costs Covered ' " ! by Voluntary Health Insurance. ." 1951-53 " '' 'f 1 1 11 f "I llppBlli ij 1 1 1 if ! '.. !..; 3... Tl : ', L.l . .1 0. . . tj ; &J...: ij AH 1- 50- 100- ZOO- 30O- 400- 500- 750- 1.000 fnmirtd 49 99 199 299 399 499 749 999 and aver familiM Hlth pnditwri (dollar) Sovrcti Health Information Foundation American families are getting about $3.1 billion a year in benefits under voluntary health insurance, Health Information Informa-tion Foundation reports. This is more than double the amount for a similar period five years c ago. These figures come from a survey made by the Foundation in cooperation with the National Nation-al Opinion Research Center of the University of Chicago. A representative cross-section of American families were interviewed inter-viewed at length about what kinds of medical services they use and how they pay for their services. The average insured family in 1957-58 had $80 in benefits from voluntary health plans, according to the Foundation. This is an increase of 78 per cent over the $45 reported in a comparable survey for 1952-53. One of the most significant findings of the survey, com ments George Bugbee, Foundation Founda-tion President, is that the families fam-ilies with unusually heavy costs for health care have been helped the most by recent increases in insurance benefits. As the chart shows, families with total health costs of $1,000 or more had 35 per cent of these expenditures covered by insurance in 19'. 7-58, against only 23 per cent for comparable families in 1952-53., At the other extreme, families with costs of under $50 had only 2 per cent of these expenses met by insurance in 1957-58. But families with such low costs can usually meet them most effectively effec-tively out of their own pockets, the Foundation points out. |