Excerpt from the article below. This woman doesn't need a free screening mammogram. She needs a screening brain scan, for which she'd have to pay out of pocket.  It's just that simple. Most Obamacare plans are really high deductible (or at best high co-pay) plans that don't start paying much at all until you've spent $6,000 per year, after that they start paying everything.

They pay for certain services that are considered public health issues, that's partly political influence and partly current studies that suggest (we all know how these things can change) money can be saved if those preventive services are offered free. As I predicted before on this site, the plans are no better and often worse than the cancelled plans that many Obamacare defenders were disparaging last year, for very similar reasons. They are all about pushing the services that might  save money for insurers and the nation's bottom line about health care spending, but they are not about helping lower and middle income people with the burden of the cost of actual individual illnesses. Keep in mind, a lot of these people have to come up with monthly premiums too, besides the $6K. Very few get full subsidy.

The bottom line: Obamacare, with its high up-fronts per year, is still going to make many people chose not to get care they need until their illness gets much worse. Just like before, because people have to pay $6K out of pocket, they will put things off until the emergency room is needed. Then they will have a debt of $6,000 but be covered for the rest of the emergency services. I suspect it's not  going to be very preventive on the nation's health care costs at all. Sure,an annual physical is included in most cases. But what if your physical says you need an expensive test or treatment? (And except for a very few, they are all expensive now, Dorothy.) Well, you've got to pay for those things, and if ain't got the money, you don't do it. Next year you go for that physical and the doctor asks, "why didn't you got get the brain scan I wanted?" You say "I couldn't afford it, but I did go and get the free mammogram and flu vaccination."

Paying for a free physical is pretty useless unless you can afford what the doctor recommends. If it's a change in diet and exercise and an aspirin once a day or some covered generic coumatin, that's fine. But those kind of health issues are not really something most people couldn't have figured out for themselves on the internet if they cared about their health. But if you've got a serious problem and need an MRI for specialists to start working on your health problems, not so great.

Patricia Wanderlich got insurance through the Affordable Care Act this year, and with good reason: She suffered a brain hemorrhage in 2011, spending weeks in a hospital intensive care unit, and has a second, smaller aneurysm that needs monitoring.

But her new plan has a $6,000 annual deductible, meaning that Ms. Wanderlich, who works part time at a landscaping company outside Chicago, has to pay for most of her medical services up to that amount. She is skipping this year’s brain scan and hoping for the best.

“To spend thousands of dollars just making sure it hasn’t grown?” said Ms. Wanderlich, 61. “I don’t have that money.”...

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Insurers must cover certain preventive services, like immunizations, cholesterol checks and screening for breast and colon cancer, at no cost to the consumer if the provider is in their network. But for other services and items, like prescription drugs, marketplace customers often have to meet their deductible before insurance starts to help.

While high-deductible plans cover most of the costs of severe illnesses and lengthy hospital stays, protecting against catastrophic debt, those plans may compel people to forgo routine care that could prevent bigger, longer-term health issues, according to experts and research.

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