Putting a cap on how much one pays in out-of-pocket expenses for health care is a big debate now in Wash­ing­ton D.C. As a part of the US health care bill pack­age, both the house and sen­ate have estab­lished dif­fer­ent price caps on what peo­ple would pay per year for health care.

To sift through some of the plans and debate, we go to this McClatchy News­pa­pers story writ­ten by David Lightman,

Accord­ing to the Amer­i­can Jour­nal of Med­i­cine study, out-of-pocket med­ical costs aver­aged $17,943 for all med­ically bank­rupt fam­i­lies in 2007 — $26,971 for unin­sured fam­i­lies and $17,749 for those who had pri­vate insur­ance at the outset.

The House bill would cap annual out-of-pocket med­ical expenses at $5,000 per indi­vid­ual and $10,000 per fam­ily start­ing in 2013. New plans offered through new employ­ers, as well as poli­cies sold through the pro­posed health insur­ance exchange, a mar­ket­place where con­sumers can com­pare plans and prices, would be sub­ject to limits.

Most employ­ers today offer poli­cies with lim­its on out-of-pocket expenses. Under Sen­ate pro­pos­als, exist­ing employer plans would be exempt from the lim­its, but the House would require employer plans to have caps in place by 2019.

The Sen­ate leg­is­la­tion would tie the annual out-of-pocket lim­its to those that exist under cur­rent law for health sav­ings accounts, which will be $5,950 and $11,900 in 2010 but should increase by the time new rules would go into effect in 2013 under the pro­posed legislation.

Out-of-pocket expenses are expected to include co-payments for med­ical ser­vices and pre­scrip­tion drugs, deductibles and co-insurance, though pre­mium pay­ments wouldn’t count toward the out-of-pocket maximum.

Once a con­sumer reached the limit, his or her plan would pay 100 per­cent of fur­ther expenses.

“This is a pretty sig­nif­i­cant improve­ment,” said Linda Blum­berg, an econ­o­mist at the Urban Insti­tute, a center-left Wash­ing­ton research group.

The health insur­ance indus­try disagrees.

“We don’t believe a cap is the best way to con­trol ris­ing health care costs,” said Robert Zirkel­bach, a spokesman for America’s Health Insur­ance Plans, the indus­try trade group.

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