Tag: ACA

Healthcare.gov? Go to the Back of the Line!!!

Dec 1, 2014• 4

ACA DATABASE

Aardvark in North Carolina writes:

On the Healthcare.gov web site I was filling the application – an arduous process that – even when pre-filled from last year, takes 30 – 45 minutes. At the review and sign, I found ONE date that was wrong: the day and month were inadvertently transposed. from 09/08 to 08/09. Since the information will be checked against tax records I thought it best to correct this prior to signing.

I clicked on the “edit” button which brought a box “Do you really want to edit your application”, Yes! That’s why I clicked the button – BOOM! back to “GO”,

So it took almost 45 minutes to go through again, (I do work by the way, so this time consuming process is not OK), but I did it. THEN at review I found I had been so frustrated OR the process accepted the key stroke wrong so I now had 09/03 instead of 09/08.

NOT wanting to go back to the very beginning AGAIN, I called the help desk, thinking this would save time. The agent was supportive and pleasant, but basically REFILLED the ENTIRE form again!!!!!!!

Help With Covered California

Nov 19, 2014• 3

By ACA DATABASE

JOE wrote THCB with an interesting question that could be an outlier or could be significant:

Do you know of a consulting firm or advisory firm that can assist me in applying for insurance through Covered California? When I applied for insurance through the Covered California website, they gave me a list of places where I can get assistance. The phone numbers go to dead voice mail boxes or don’t work at all. I am willing to pay for assistance from somebody that understands the system.

Grubernomics

Nov 18, 2014• 100

By SAURABH JHA, MD

In the giddy days after the passage of ACA, I was chatting to a PhD student in health economics. He was in love with the ACA. He kept repeating that it would reduce costs, increase quality and increase access. Nothing original. You know the sort of stuff you heard at keynotes of medical meetings; ‘Healthcare post Obamacare’ or ‘Radiology in the new era.’ Talks warning us that we were exiting the Cretaceous period.

He spoke about variation in healthcare, six sigma, fee-for-value and ‘paying doctors to do the right thing.’

‘How?’ I asked.

‘I just told you, we need to pay doctors for value and outcomes.’ He smugly replied.

‘How?’ I asked again.

He did not answer. Instead he gave me the look that one gives an utter imbecile who doesn’t know the difference between a polygon and a triangle.Continue reading…

Getting Your Own Health Records Online: The Good and the Not So Good

Oct 14, 2014• 27

By LYGEIA RICCARDI

Making Sense of Blue Button, Meaningful Use, and What’s Going on in Washington …

At the recent Health 2.0 Conference in Santa Clara, co-chair Matt Holt expressed frustration about the difficulty of getting copies of his young daughter’s medical records. His experience catalyzed a heated discussion about individuals’ electronic access to their own health information. Many people are confused about or unaware of their legal rights, the policies that support those rights, and the potential implications of digital access to health data by individuals. The Health 2.0 conference crowd included 2000 entrepreneurs, consumer technology companies, patient advocates, and other potentially “disruptive” forces in healthcare, in addition to more traditional health system players.

Why is this topic so important? Until now, most people haven’t accessed their own health records, whether electronically or in paper, and I believe that making it easier to do so will help tip the scales toward more meaningful consumer/patient engagement in healthcare and in health. Access by individuals and their families to their own health records can empower them to coordinate care among multiple healthcare providers, find and address dangerous factual errors, and take advantage of a growing ecosystem of apps and tools for improving health-related behaviors, saving money on health services, and getting more convenient, personalized care.

A shorthand phrase for this kind of personal empowerment through access to digital health data is “Blue Button,” which is also the name of a public-private initiative in which hundreds of leading healthcare organizations across the US participate. The Blue Button Initiative is bolstered by the electronic access to health information requirements for patients in the “Meaningful Use” EHR Incentive Program, which is administered by CMS (the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services) with companion standards and certification requirements set by ONC (the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology).Continue reading…

Behind the CVS Health Decision

Sep 8, 2014• 37

By PAUL KECKLEY

Last Tuesday at midnight, CVS officially changed its name to CVS Health and simultaneously cleared its 7,700 retail stores of tobacco products a month earlier than previously reported. Its stores will be called CVS Pharmacy with plans to expand its 900 primary care clinics to 1,500 by 2017, and its $90 billion pharmacy benefits management unit, CVS Caremark, continuing to play a key role in serving its 65 million customers(1).

And the following day, the CMS Office of the Actuary released its forecast of health spending, predicting that health spending will likely return to 6% annual increases for the next decade(2).

No doubt, the timing of the two is coincidental. But taken together, they paint a future state in healthcare that’s distinctly different from its recent past.

Medicaid 2.0

Sep 2, 2014• 32

By CECI CONNOLLY

While fierce debate continues to envelop much of the Affordable Care Act, financial data for many of the nation’s health systems reveal one clear fact: the optional Medicaid expansion has resulted in hospital haves and have nots.

An analysis by PwC’s Health Research Institute (HRI) of newly released earnings and patient volume data shows a clear financial split between healthcare providers operating in states that expanded Medicaid and those that have not. The law as written would have provided Medicaid coverage to every American earning less than 138% of the federal poverty level ($16,105 for an individual). But a June 2012 Supreme Court ruling made the expansion optional for states, creating a patchwork of coverage.

Health systems and physician groups delivering care in the 26 states and the District of Columbia that have embraced the federally-funded expansion have reported a significant rise in patient volumes and paying consumers and a measureable reduction in uncompensated care levels.

This year alone LifePoint Hospitals has seen a 30.3% reduction in its uninsured and charity care patients, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Tenet Healthcare, which operates in five Medicaid expansion states, saw uninsured and charity care admissions decline by 46% in the expansion states, coupled with a 20.5% increase in Medicaid inpatient admissions in those same states, according to an HRI analysis which will be released next week.

In all, HRI analyzed financial data from the nation’s five largest for-profit health systems—HCA Holdings, LifePoint, Tenet, Community Health Systems and Universal Health Services, representing 538 hospitals in 35 states. Our team also reviewed data from several mid-sized hospitals, government reportsand industry surveys.

Narrow Networking

Jul 29, 2014• 12

By DAVID DRANOVE and CRAIG GARTHWAITE

The Affordable Care Act is premised, at least in part, on the notion that competition can be harnessed to reduce healthcare costs and improve quality. This explains why insurance in the individual market has not been nationalized. Instead, consumers go to an online exchange where they customers can easily (at least in theory) compare plans offered by different firms. Unleashing competitive forces should result in lower premiums for these plans. And why not? Over the past two decades, competition has been one of the few success stories in the U.S. health economy. For example, when competition intensified in the 1990s, healthcare costs moderated. When competition weakened in the wake of provider mergers and the backlash to the narrow networks that were essential to cost containment, healthcare costs rose.

When most people think about the benefits of competition, they tend to think about prices. Monopolies charge high prices; competitors charge low prices. There is nothing wrong with this perspective, but it misses a more fundamental point. In the long run, the greatest benefit of competition is that it has the potential to fuel innovation. This is as true, in theory, for health insurers as it is for telecommunications and consumer electronics. It hasn’t always been true in practice; for several decades after the IRS made employer-sponsored health insurance tax deductible, insurers tended to offer the same costly indemnity products. But consumers eventually demanded lower premiums, and insurers responded with managed care. After the backlash, insurers developed high deductible health plans and value based insurance design. Insurers are now moving towards reference pricing. These plans offer consumers reimbursement up to a pre-specified level for treatments that can be easily broken into a treatment episode such as hip replacements or MRIs. Patients have the choice of any provider, but they bear the cost of choosing a more expensive facility.

High deductibles and reference pricing are fine, but do not always work in practice. Chronically ill patients quickly exhaust their deductibles, and reference pricing does not work well for chronic diseases. In order to complement these tactics, some insurers are once again offering narrow network plans. We commented in earlier blog posts that the ACA would catalyze the return of these narrow networks and also warned that this might fuel another backlash. Unfortunately, a recent New York Times article shows, the backlash is well underway.

Healthcare Reform Even the Tea Party Could Support

Jul 9, 2014• 56

By BLAKE ASHBY

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) is the law of the land, and nothing the Tea Party does is likely to lead to its repeal. But the ACA can be amended to make it less objectionable, and it wouldn’t be that hard. We just need to modify it to allow Tea Partiers (and others) to form their own healthcare groups.

All insurance, including healthcare insurance, works by forming risk pools. The members of the pool contribute to a pool of money which is then used to pay the claims by the members. Most participants pay in more than they use. In healthcare most people pay more money into the pool than the cost of the care they receive. A few people receive far more care than they pay for.

For risk pools to work, boundaries have to be drawn around what is paid for by the risk pool. As an example car insurance policies place a limit on how much they will pay for any one accident. It’s nice to think that as a rich country we don’t have to draw boundaries around healthcare, that we should be able to pay for any possible medical treatment, but we can’t. We already spend almost twice as much on healthcare as other nations and if costs keep increasing eventually it will bankrupt our country.

Many people blame private insurance companies for our expensive healthcare system, but insurers actually have very little to do with rising costs. Instead advancing medical technology is the primary cause. Our for-profit medical technology industry has made amazing advances in treatment and care that have allowed us to save people that used to die. But its primary goal is still profit. Every year the industry comes up with new procedures or refinements. Most provide only incremental improvements in care but they all come with a higher price tag. Every year the industry spends billions of dollars – yes, billions – successfully encouraging doctors to recommend the new procedures. And it’s about to get much, much worse. There is a flood of new treatments and targeted drugs getting ready to hit the market. Some will undoubtedly be true advances, but all are likely to cost tens and even hundreds of thousands of dollars per treatment.

What the Supreme Court Decisions Mean For the Future of Employer-Based Insurance

Jul 8, 2014• 6

By PAUL KECKLEY

Monday, in its 5:4 ruling in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, the Supreme Court affirmed that for-profit employers may opt out of certain methods of contraception it finds objectionable on religious grounds. In effect, the ruling gave standing to a company’s ability to use the 1993 Religious Freedom and Restoration Act, previously applied to individuals. Thursday, the Justices voted 6:3 that Wheaton College, is not required to transfer contraception coverage to a private insurer via submission of ESBA Form 770 deeming it an impermissible burden on its religious exercise. Instead, Wheaton will simply be required to notify HHS of its objection.

Pundits have framed these two decisions as a pivot point for the future of the Affordable Care Act. I think that’s overstated, though it assures the ACA will stay in the news and be prominent in Campaign 2014. I read the rulings and dissenting opinions: the points of view frame complicated questions, like ‘is a company entitled to the same religious freedoms granted individuals’ and ‘what are the limits of a company’s decision-making about matters of health’ and so on.

In practical terms, the immediate implications of the decisions are two:

The White House will have to develop an alternative path to contraceptive coverage.Prominent news organizations have speculated about two possibilities that would secure contraception coverage for women who work for employers who refuse coverage on religious grounds: 1-the federal government could create a new federal program or 2-it could require private insurers provide coverage directly. Each would be challenged by opposition: If the former, the White House would face pushback from critics who would call it “a new entitlement”. If the latter, insurers would need to raise premiums or secure federal funding if expected to add the costs of contraception coverage for this specific circumstance. Either way, it’s a sticky situation.

The rulings mean scores of companies and not-for-profits will file challenges to the ACA invoking religious freedom through the court system: an employer might take the position that vaccinations are a religious objection, or transfusion of non-autologous blood, or others. Already, more than 50 cases are working their way through circuit courts: more are expected.

What a New Benefit From Starbucks Teaches Us About the Future of Employer Provided Health Insurance

Jun 17, 2014• 12

By DAVID DRANOVE and CRAIG GARTHWAITE

Starbucks, which taught America to love lattes, made news this week with the announcement of a new tuition benefit for its partners (Starbucks-speak for employees). At first glance this move seems like simply another benefit in Starbucks relatively (for its industry) generous compensation package. In particular, Starbucks has long been heralded for providing health insurance for all partners working more than 20 hours per week. It is this connection to health insurance that we wish to explore. While Howard Schulz the founder and current CEO of Starbucks has long said the firm offers health insurance because it is the “right thing to do” for their employees, we have always suspected a more profit maximizing goal for this compensation decision. If we put on our strategy hats (we are both members of Kellogg’s Strategy Department), we can deduce that as a profit-maximizing firm, what Starbucks giveth with tuition benefits it may soon taketh away from health insurance benefits. In the process, Starbucks may be heralding the demise of employer sponsored health insurance, something we have predicted in previous blogs.