What are preventive health services?
Preventive health services help people stay healthy and detect health problems early. Preventive care includes services like wellness visits, immunizations, contraceptive services, and cancer screenings. Specific services recommended by expert committees must be provided at no cost to the patient. This means that even if a patient has not met their plan deductible or out-of-pocket limits, their health insurance should still cover the full cost of these services without requiring the patient to pay a deductible, co-insurance or co-payment. The list of preventive services for adults, women, and children that should be provided at no cost is available on HealthCare.gov.
Who determines which services qualify as no-cost preventive care?
The list of preventive services is based on recommendations from the United States Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF), the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), and the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP).
How much do preventive health services cost?
Even though patients should not have to pay anything for covered preventive services, insurers must still cover the cost of these services. The price of each preventive service is the total amount paid by insurance for the service and represents what patients could pay if the service no longer qualified as no-cost preventive care.
Use the table below to find the price of selected preventive services. The list below includes some of the most commonly used services but is not a comprehensive list of all services we identify as preventive. For a full list, please refer to the methods section. Note that these prices represent the average prices of each service across different settings (e.g. outpatient and office), and previous research shows that the price of services can vary by site of service.