Tag: insurance coverage

Now More Than Ever, the Case for Medicaid Expansion

Apr 19, 2019

By PHUOC LE, MD and SAM APTEKAR

A friend of mine told me the other day, “We’ve seen our insured patient population go from 15% to 70% in the few years since Obamacare.” As a primary care physician in the Midwest, he’s worked for years in an inner-city clinic that serves a poor community, many of whom also suffer from mental illness. Before the Affordable Care Act (ACA), the clinic constantly struggled to stay afloat financially. Too often patients would be sent to an emergency room because the clinic couldn’t afford to provide some of the simplest medical tests, like an x-ray. Now, with most of his patients insured through the Medicaid expansion program, the clinic has beefed up its staffing and ancillary services, allowing them to provide better preventive care, and in turn, reduce costly ER visits.

From the time Medicaid was established in 1965 as the country’s first federally-funded health insurance plan for low-income individuals, state governments have only been required to cover the poorest of their citizens. Before the ACA, some 47 million Americans were uninsured because their incomes exceeded state-determined benchmarks for Medicaid eligibility and they earned far too little to buy insurance through the private marketplace.

The ACA reduced the number of uninsured Americans by mandating that states increase their income requirement for Medicaid to 138% of the federal poverty line (about $1,330 per month for a single individual), and promising that the federal government would cover the cost to do so. However, in a 2012 decision, the Supreme Court left it to the states to decide if they wanted to increase their Medicaid eligibility. If they agreed to adopt Medicaid expansion, the federal government offered to cover 100% of the increased cost in 2014 and 90% by 2021.

Mental Health Parity and the Affordable Care Act

Nov 11, 2013• 5

By David Dranove & Craig Garthwaite

The Obama administration announced on Friday that it will require parity for mental health insurance coverage. That means that health insurers must apply the same copayments, deductibles, and visit limits to mental healthcare as they do for physical health care treatment. Call it fair, call it political, but please don’t call it a good economic or health policy.

The story about how this is fair, or at least politically popular goes something like this: Health insurers are evil and powerful firms that can and will do whatever they want. On the other hand, patients with mental health problems are politically weak and must be protected from the powerful insurers that have no interest in taking care of them.

In this story, the Obama administration rides in on its white stallion and rights the wrongs being perpetrated by the villainous insurance companies. All we need is a damsel in distress, an evil step-mother, and a catchy tune and Disney will sign the movie rights.

The problem with this simplistic story line is that you can replace “mental health” with nearly any other condition and the story would sound just as plausible.

My Return to American Health Care

Oct 10, 2013• 41

By Beth Arnold

A year and a half ago, my husband, James Morgan, and I moved back to the U.S. after living 10 years in France.

We returned more or less kicking and screaming. We had been away long enough to lose some of our American culture and to prefer the European way of life, despite our squabbles with it–and every American abroad has some squabbles. I had discovered I was a born expat, something I’d suspected my entire adult life — from my first trip to Europe when I was 19 years old–but hadn’t arranged to test until my younger daughter graduated from high school. Jim and I are both writers, and I’d thought of a book idea for him (Chasing Matisse) that would take us to France, and my intention was for us to stay there.

But there were things we’d left undone for the 10 years we’d been away that needing tending to — life was calling us back. And if the truth be known, I felt France was falling behind in the world, and her inability to change was grating. Paris was stuck in her perpetual stupendous, effervescent beauty, while nothing new happened there at all. This city I love more than any other had long since lost the artistic dynamism that had propelled it forward with Picasso, Matisse, and the other artists that the Lost Generation had adopted and promoted in the early part of the 20th century, when Malcolm Cowley wrote his classic Exile’s Return.

The World Wars had crippled France for a time, and she had gotten back on her feet. But what the French do so very well is the past — not the present or future — and this is even truer in our digital global society. The French refusal to change defines the Gallic nation in every way imaginable, and the centuries-long celebration of their grand culture is what we love about them — and is also placing them in the rear of the international pack.

Except for this — their Number One in the World (as determined by the World Health Organization) health care system.

One of the things I most dreaded about returning to America was having to deal with a health care system that was an embarrassing national wreck.

China’s Ghost Hospitals: A Hard Landing Ahead for China’s Health Care Reforms

Apr 13, 2013• 4

By Damjan Denoble

China is in the midst of a comprehensive $178.3 billion health care reform that is arguably the most ambitious among a series of stalled, largely counterproductive post-1978 efforts to improve access and reduce inequalities between rural and urban areas within China’s regionalized health care system. Unless the health care reforms are accompanied by a reform of fiscal policies, however, the absence of good governance brought on by financial constraints and perverse cadre payment incentives at the sub-national level is likely to undermine efforts to create a robust primary care infrastructure, and will consequently result in reform failure.

The wide-ranging economic reforms of the 1980’s transferred the responsibility for funding health care onto China’s local governments. In areas of China where economic reform resulted in an economic boom – i.e. major coastal cities like Shanghai and the first of the Special Economic Zones in Guangdong and Fujian province – local governments were able to raise enough money from increased tax revenue to greatly counterbalance the withdrawal of Central Government funding. In most of the country, however, Central Government funding decreased while the tax base stayed unchanged or shrunk owing to outward migration to the urban centers and the just mentioned Special Economic Zones.

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