This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, September 22nd, 2016. I'm Caleb Brown.

Employers are shifting some of the costs of health insurance back to employees.

At least that's what we're led to believe.

Cato Institute Director of Health Policy Studies Michael Cannon says in a sense

it's all really the employee's money.

They just don't get to control it.

NPR points to this study by the Kaiser Family Foundation

and they, the lead is high deductible health plans are the new normal.

Just over half of employees this year have a health insurance policy with a deductible of at least $1,000.

Before we get to the substance of the Kaiser study, since when is a thousand dollars

considered high deductible?

Has that always been the case?

Well, probably for the past 50 or more years in the United States because remember for 70 years we have had a huge

tax preference for employer-sponsored insurance that encourages people to demand more insurance, more comprehensive insurance, in part because there's that tax

preference in part because it seems like it's their employer's money that's buying that

insurance and so deductibles have been relatively low until

recently they've begun to rise and this is actually a quite natural market response to rising health insurance premiums.

Your health insurance premiums go up too much, well you decide to save some money on premiums

by accepting a little more exposure to the risk that you will need

expensive medical care and you do that by increasing your deductibles or other

cross sharing. All right yeah it seems like if there's only one way that an employee can make some sort of demand

on an employer for a plan they otherwise don't control it is would be over deductibles.

...