Tag: Health Insurance Exchanges

Will ACA Implementation Lead to a Spike in Demand for Care?

Sep 26, 2013• 21

By David I. Auerbach

As the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) exchanges open and Medicaid expansion takes effect, millions of uninsured Americans will gain new coverage. This raises a key question: how are we possibly going to meet the demands of all of these new individuals entering the system? The physician workforce is growing slowly, at best, at a time when an aging population is increasing demand for care.

Predictions include long lines for everyone, rising prices and premiums as physicians are able to command greater market power, and reduced quality of care. Some have recommended additional government funding to help train more medical residents as a response.

But while studies predict ACA implementation will prompt an increase in demand for medical services, there is evidence that the increase in demand will not be as great as the raw number of newly insured Americans might suggest.

The latest CBO forecast projects the reduction in the number of uninsured Americans under the ACA will be 11 million people next year and 24 million by 2016. That’s an increase in the percentage of Americans with insurance of roughly 5% in 2014 and 12% in 2016. If the uninsured used zero health care today, but upon becoming insured used the same amount as a typical insured person, then the increase in demand for care would be the same as the increase in coverage.

In reality, the uninsured use substantial amounts of health care – but only about half the care that the insured use today. One reason is because they are uninsured – paying full prices for care rather than a small copay discourages use. Another reason also explains why many (but not all) are uninsured in the first place: they are healthy and don’t anticipate needing or wanting medical care.

When the uninsured gain coverage, demand does increase, but not dramatically, studies show. Evidence from the Oregon Health Insurance experiment, in which a funding cap forced the state to grant Medicaid coverage to some applicants but not others using a lottery-type system, found that those who did gain coverage increased their use of both hospital and physician care by about one-third relative to controls.

Disruptive Innovation and the Affordable Care Act

Sep 26, 2013• 19

By Ben Wanamaker

This post highlights the findings of a paper released today by the Clayton Christensen Institute, “Seize the ACA: The Innovator’s Guide to the Affordable Care Act.”

Since its passage in 2010, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) has been analyzed by experts from nearly every political, economic, and health policy angle possible. Yet in the noisy debate about whether the legislation is good or bad and whether to implement or repeal it, we think there’s something missing: a rigorous but practical discussion of the innovation opportunities created by the legislation and the barriers to innovation it imposes.

To facilitate that goal, we analyzed the ACA through the lens of the theory of disruptive innovation. First articulated by Harvard professor Clayton M. Christensen, disruptive innovation theory explains how innovations that decrease cost and increase accessibility transform entire industries.

As existing products increase in performance and begin to exceed customer needs (think of next year’s biggest Cadillac model), low-cost, lower-performance alternatives created by new entrants take root in the low end of the market (think of next year’s smallest Kia model).

These new products are initially inferior in comparison to established products, but they become better and better until they “disrupt” and eventually topple larger incumbent competitors.

So how does the ACA affect the pace of disruptive innovation in health care? What opportunities does it create for innovators? What barriers does it inadvertently erect? Here are a few thoughts from our recent paper.

What Your Employer Is Secretly Thinking As Obamacare Goes Live

Sep 25, 2013• 18

By Kip Piper

Employers face a multitude of challenges under the Affordable Care Act (ACA). The ACA fundamentally changes the landscape for employer sponsored health insurance, forcing businesses to understand, navigate, and adapt to a quickly changing, highly complex, and still uncertain marketplace for health benefits. To illustrate this, here are 10 pain points employers face in dealing with Obamacare:

1. Explaining ACA to Employees, Dependents, and Retirees:
Effective internal communications is a strong indicator of a firm’s financial performance. Indeed, internal communications is an essential ingredient for an engaged, productive workforce with low turnover. This is all the more important under the dynamics and complexities of the ACA.

Every employer must be prepared to explain the ACA. Like it or not, employees will look to their employer to explain the Affordable Care Act, even if the employer is not changing benefits. Employees have friends and family who will need help understanding Obamacare. The airwaves, mail boxes, and street corners will be packed with messaging from all angles and interests – some pro, some con, some partisan, some factually wrong, some even fraudulent, much of it confusing, and all of it mind numbingly complex.

This is an enormous new opportunity for employers to beef up their internal communications, demonstrate leadership, and support employees and their families. This will also serve to boost a company’s external reputation since the help and information provided to employees and retirees will be shared by them with a much wider audience – their parents, children, spouses, siblings, friends, and neighbors.

However, when communicating and educating, given the dynamics and contentious nature of Obamacare, employers must also take into consideration the political leanings of most employees and other key stakeholders, such as the board of directors and state and local leaders. This is not a factor in most employer benefit issues but the ACA is entirely different.

2. Making Tough Decisions on Coverage and Benefits:
While making tough decisions on benefits is nothing new for employers, the ACA presents a new set of decision points. Every business has their own starting point – what, if anything, they were already offering, who they were covering, and how much they were contributing financially to the cost of coverage.

For those employers that were not providing full-time workers with health coverage before, the ACA creates a new pay-or-play decision for those with more than 50 full-time workers. For every employer, the ACA creates a strong financial incentive to either drop coverage, dial-down employer contributions, or move to defined contribution.

State Insurance Exchange Blind Spots: Unknown Risks and Unintended Consequences

Sep 23, 2013• 6

By Seth Kneller

October 1st marks the first ever public exchange open enrollment season. This means some of the speculation around consumer awareness and understanding, enrollment/uptake, premiums, and payer participation (not to mention the technical readiness of the exchanges) will finally subside and give way to a clearer picture of the PPACA’s initial success in mandating individual health coverage.

Despite this approaching level of clarity, however, several very significant “blind-spots” will continue to persist, principally for the health insurance carriers that choose to participate by offering PPACA compliant plans in the exchange.

This is due to the law’s guaranteed issue mandate prohibiting health carriers from denying coverage based on preexisting conditions. As a result, the traditional enrollment process which consists of a comprehensive assessment of each applicant’s health status and risk cast against the backdrop of time-tested underwriting guidelines is completely thrown out.

What takes its place is an extremely limited data set (i.e., the member’s age, tobacco/smoking status, geographic region, and family size) from which carriers can determine pre-approved premiums and variability therein. To use an analogy, health insurance companies no longer have a “bouncer at the door” turning people away, or a sign reading No shirt, No shoes, No service at the entrance.

In other words, everyone, regardless of their risk profile, must now be welcomed in with open arms and with very limited risk-adjusted rates.

This wouldn’t necessarily be a problem if the enrolling population comprised a well understood risk pool representing a true cross-section of the population. The reality, however, is that a predominantly unknown and potentially unhealthy population will flood the individual health insurance marketplace in a two weeks just as most states quickly phase out their high-risk pre-existing condition pools and shift them into the exchanges.

Five Reasons the Federal Insurance Exchange Glitch May Not Be That Big Of A Deal. Knock On Wood.

Sep 20, 2013• 10

By Dan Diamond

The Wall Street Journal broke the news Thursday night that a “pricing glitch” is plaguing the federal health insurance exchange software … with less than two weeks to go before the exchanges are supposed to launch.

Basically, the exchange’s calculator can’t do a pretty important piece of math: How much each consumer will need to pay for his or her specific coverage.

Glitches had been somewhat expected—there had been rumblings of technical problems, despite officials’ public vows of confidence—but it doesn’t make the Journal‘s scoop less of a story. Opponents of Obamacare will use any delay to raise fresh concerns about the law’s implementation, and even the most ardent supporters of the ACA acknowledge that having working software is crucial to a working rollout on Oct. 1.

And what happens to enrollment targets if the glitches aren’t quickly resolved and would-be customers get frustrated and turn away?

There are several potential interpretations and implications here, given that this story is bound up in both politics and policy. From my perch, I’d offer these five quick reactions to the Journal‘s scoop.

1. This news is not a surprise.
When reporting on the ACA’s rollout, especially since the Supreme Court’s ruling last June, officials and analysts kept raising the same question with me: Will the exchanges be ready in time?

Keep in mind, the exchanges are intended to combine an unprecedented mix of eligibility verification systems, subsidy calculations, and thousands of insurance products.
Add an additional factor—the pace of ACA implementation lagged between 2010 and 2012 because of the ongoing uncertainty over whether the law was even constitutional—and the level of complexity involved in getting the exchanges off the ground really is astounding.

There have been hints that these systems might not be ready. Federal officials announced over the summer that they would scale back the exchanges’ verification requirements until 2015. And the contractors charged with designing the systems might as well be working on the Siberian insurance exchange, given how they’ve ignored media requests.

2. The federal exchange isn’t the only one with glitchy software. State exchanges are having problems, too.
Oregon has already announced that it plans to delay the formal roll-out of Cover Oregon to continue beta-testing, and California (a state that has moved exceptionally quickly to implement health reform) was weighing contingency plans for Covered California, too.

As Caroline Pearson of Avalere Health told me a few weeks ago, “if California’s talking about contingency planning, then we need to acknowledge that any number of state-run exchanges may not be fully operational by Oct. 1.”

However, the federal exchange software takes on extra importance given the sheer number of states (36) and potential customers (32 million uninsured) that will be shopping through its exchange.

Get primed. This Daily Briefing primer offers a quick review of exchange operations.
Go deep. This Health Care Advisory Board webconference reviews challenges in patient enrollment; how the exchanges interact with Medicaid and employer-sponsored insurance, and implications for hospitals and health systems.

Continue reading…

Not Quite Ready For Prime Time: The State Health Insurance Marketplaces and Google

Sep 17, 2013• 2

By Elaine K. Swift and David McCormick

All of the state health insurance marketplaces (also known as exchanges) are online, but millions of expected users may have a hard time finding them. Marketplaces will enable shopping and enrollment mainly through their websites. States are using a variety of promotional strategies, but most people will likely find marketplaces in the same way they find other websites—through common keyword searches on Google, by far the nation’s dominant search engine. Poor search engine results can create serious barriers to shopping and enrollment, the major measures of success for marketplaces and, by extension, the success of the Affordable Care Act (ACA).

We used standard methods to assess Google results for the 17 marketplaces operated by 16 states and Washington, DC that offer individuals, families, and small businesses a place to shop for health care coverage. Over three days in mid-September, we looked at results for keywords that data from Google show people are commonly using to search for health insurance. We examined both unpaid (or “organic”) and paid (or “sponsored”) results. Although research shows that unpaid results get more attention, paid results can also lead to page views.

Our preliminary findings show that marketplaces for four states—Idaho, Maryland, New Mexico, and New York—and Washington, DC did not appear on the first page of Google results, which generates 92% of all page views. In addition, both unpaid and paid search results for most of the remaining 12 states were frequently absent from page one.

With enrollment in the marketplaces opening October 1 for coverage beginning January 1, this would be a good time to focus on search engine optimization (SEO), the process of increasing the rankings of unpaid or “organic” search results. Once implemented, SEO results can be seen quickly, especially for a topic as popular and important as new health insurance options. However, it requires analysis, planning, and time to implement.

Methods for Conducting Search Engine Result Testing

To test search engine results for state-operated health insurance marketplaces, we used the five keywords most effective in producing page views of a prominent healthcare-related website produced by a federal client: Affordable Care Act, affordable health care, health care, health insurance, and Medicaid.

Health Exchange Confusion: Why We’re Getting the IBM Story Wrong

Sep 10, 2013• 13

By David Williams

I was a bit surprised by the front-page headline and accompanying article in the weekend Wall Street Journal (IBM to Move Retirees Off Its Health Rolls). The headline and subtext of the article are that IBM is ending health benefits for retirees, leaving them to fend for themselves. But as I read through the specifics that doesn’t appear to be at all what’s happening. Unfortunately, the article’s main impact is to leave an unduly negative impression of private health insurance exchanges.

Retiree health benefits are a big deal, especially for employees who retire before they reach the Medicare eligibility age of 65. A typical early retiree in his or her 50s will face high premiums in the individual market compared to a younger, and typically healthier, person. If they are among the few whose company provides generous coverage they are very lucky.

[On a side note, life is about to get easier for early retirees who have to buy their own insurance, thanks to Obamacare’s banning of medical underwriting and limits on the ratio of premiums charged to older people versus younger ones.]

When a person turns 65 life gets a lot easier on the health insurance front as the federal government takes over the vast majority of costs. As a result, a retiree on Medicare is much cheaper for an employer to provide health care benefits to, since they are essentially just paying for supplemental coverage.

The Exchanges Won’t Be Ready in Time. And it Probably Won’t Matter.

Sep 5, 2013• 7

By Dan Diamond

As states race to implement health reform, California doesn’t want to settle for second.

“We don’t want to be a pace car state” when it comes to implementing health reform, state HHS Secretary Diana Dooley told Politico back in January 2011. “We want to be the lead car.”

It’s a metaphor that California leaders have returned to time and again. And to their credit, they’ve often succeeded.

While other states waffled, Golden State officials quickly embraced key Obamacare provisions like expanding Medicaid and creating insurance pools for individuals with pre-existing conditions.

At the same time, lawmakers crafted legislation intended to conform California’s health insurance plans to new standards under the Affordable Care Act.

And Covered California, the state’s health insurance exchange, also has drawn national attention for its speedy implementation. Among the 17 states that opted to run their own exchanges, California has “certainly [been] in the lead on getting their health plan information out … and getting the contracts signed,” Rachel Dolan, who monitors exchange activity for State Refor(u)m, a project of the National Academy of State Health Policy, said.

But the driving metaphor only extends so far.

“I don’t think it’s a race,” Dolan added, cautioning that each state might take unique approaches to exchange implementation — and objectively judging those individual strategies is impossible.

And a more essential issue might be getting lost, amid the growing number of questions over which state exchanges will be open for business on Oct. 1.

“Lots of people are asking about readiness,” said Caroline Pearson, who leads Avalere Health’s efforts to track health reform implementation. “But no one is asking about whether it matters.”

Where the States Stand on Readiness
The sprint to get the exchanges off the ground — which for some states didn’t really begin in earnest until after the Supreme Court’s June 2012 decision to uphold the ACA — has led to repeated delays and ongoing concerns.

In the Eleventh Hour

Aug 21, 2013• 6

By Kevin Walsh

The stories you’re hearing about lamp-lit, midnight pow-wows taking place in state offices are true. The states are working around the clock at a feverish pace to meet the Health Insurance Marketplace go-live date of Oct. 1, 2013. From conversations with my counterparts who are leading the marketplaces, I understand that some of the most significant concerns include:

System of Record: For states building their own marketplaces, the first design decision is around the system of record. Some states are electing to use the HIX itself as their eligibility system of record, funneling all eligibility determinations – tax credits, cost-sharing reductions, Medicaid, Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) and Basic Health Plan – through one platform. Other states are designing their marketplaces as entry points, from which eligibility decisions flow to a legacy system for determination decisions. Either way, states are finding that the project is akin to remodeling a 747 while it’s in the air. The legacy systems need to be updated so they can coordinate and speak to the HIX. That’s a massive undertaking on its own, but it also has to be done while the HIX is still being designed.

The Federal Hub: State marketplace leaders are also considering the readiness and functionality of the federal hub. States will be required to check in with the federal hub for applicants’ immigration status, income level, etc. The federal hub is being built and rolled out at the same time that states are designing the rules for how their marketplaces will speak to and integrate with it. Again, it’s a bit like remodeling an airplane mid-flight.

Talmudic-Like Studies of Republican Health Reform Ideas

Aug 18, 2013• 65

By Uwe Reinhardt

After doing Talmudic-like studies of the doctrines on health reform promulgated by Republican health-policy makers and the conservative economists who inspired them during the past two decades, I am devastated to discover that all of those studies have been for naught. We are now told, sometimes by the same prophets of yore, that these doctrines were not only wrong, but outright heretical, which in this context means un-American.

New doctrines are rumored to be in the making, but the first word on them has yet to be committed to new, sacred tablets, mainly because there have not yet emerged any new ideas worth committing to tablets.

Do not take my word for it. Newt Gingrich, one of the Grand Old Party’s aging prophets, said so himself in his recent speech to the Republican National Committee.

Comes now conservative commentator John R. Graham of the Pacific Research Institute, telling us that Republicans seem lost in the desert even in their hit-and-run insurgency against their sworn enemy, the Affordable Care Act of 2010 (ACA).

What is a befuddled immigrant to the United States like me, eagerly trying to become a right thinking American, to make of it all?

My early introduction to the texts coming from conservative thinking on health reform was the Heritage Plan of 1989, Viewed through the prism of the ACA of 2010, its language seems eerily familiar. One provision, for example, proposed a:

“[m]andate all households to obtain adequate insurance. Many states now require passengers in automobiles to wear seatbelts for their own protection. Many others require anybody driving a car to have liability insurance. But neither the federal government nor any state requires all households to protect themselves from the potentially catastrophic costs of a serious accident or illness. Under the Heritage plan, there would be such a requirement” (p.5).

The Heritage Plan also called for income-related, refundable tax credits toward the purchase of private health insurance. Although it did not call for community rated premiums, it proposed means-tested public subsidies and toward high out-of-pocket expenses of individuals and families. It did not spell out the daunting administrative apparatus that would entail. But one can imagine the required new bureaucratic apparatus, replete with auditors to prevent fraud and abuse. Presumably, income-related subsidies would have involved the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) in some ways as well.

Next came a text put forth by conservative economist Mark V. Pauly and like-minded colleagues in Health Affairs. It is worth a reading again. Here’s the core of these prophets’ proposal:

“In our scheme, every person would be required to obtain basic coverage, through either an individual or a family insurance plan. …All basic plans would be required to cover specified health services; plans could, however, offer more generous benefits or supplemental policies. The maximum out-of-pocket expense (stop-loss) permitted would be geared to income, with more complete coverage required for lower-income people, to ensure that no one faced the risk of out-of-pocket expenses that were catastrophic, given their income.” Again, lots of government intrusion into health care, along with links to the IRS.

There then followed a real life health bill based on these ideas, the late Republican John Chafee’s antidote to the emerging Clinton plan. It was called the “Health Equity and Access Reform Today Act of 1993” and had an impressively long list of Republican co-sponsors, among them Senator’s Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), now fierce opponents of the ACA. As the folks at the Kaiser Family Foundation have shown, many of its provisions of Chafee’s bill have a striking similarity to provisions in the ACA of 2010 and comparing.