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Tag: MLR

Medical Loss Ratio: Putting Percentages and Politics Aside

The Medical Loss Ratio (MLR) policy written into the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) requires health insurance companies to deliver more direct value to consumers by mandating that they spend a higher percentage of premium dollars collected on medical care, as opposed to administrative costs.

The new law requires that at least 85 percent of all premium dollars collected by insurance companies for large employer plans be spent on healthcare services and quality improvement. For plans sold to individuals and small employers, at least 80 percent of the premium must be spent on benefits and quality improvement. If insurance companies do not meet these goals because of administrative costs or high profits, they must provide rebates to consumers starting in 2012.

While much debate exists on if this is requirement is “fair,” those on both side of the argument can agree that any reduction in administrative costs is a step in the right direction, especially if it frees up dollars to be spent in areas that will directly impact members. Moving beyond politics and percentages, payers can save up to 30-50 percent in operating costs when working with a partner to streamline back office processes. Examples include:

  • Claims processing, billing and provider maintenance: By outsourcing standard transactional services, payers can increase data quality and accelerate turnaround time on claims processing and lower costs.
  • Enrollment processing: Payers can turn to partners to handle standard enrollment functions including setting up new member accounts, staffing call centers for member questions and issuing satisfaction surveys.
  • Auditing solutions: Recovering funds from incorrectly paid claims is a service payers can outsource that can recoup funds by having an outsourcing partner track and even litigate wrongful payment claims on an insurance company’s behalf.
  • Customer care: Using a partner to help communicate plan information and answer questions from members allows payers to focus on quality of care and new product introduction, while reducing costs and complying with regulatory demands.Continue reading…

Medical Loss Ratios – Again!

A new study, reported in the American Journal of Managed Care, seems likely to add more heat to the continuing medical loss ratio controversy.

The Accountable Care Act effectively mandates that health insurers achieve MLRs of 85 percent for large group business and 80 percent for small group and individual business, with insurers not meeting these thresholds required to make rebates to affected policyholders. However, the ACA allows HHS to issue a waiver if the requirement would disrupt a state’s insurance market. So far, an individual coverage waiver has been granted to the State of Maine, with eight other states’ waiver requests being considered. The study reported by AJMC examined individual coverage data from health insurer filings to state regulators, as reported to the National Association of Insurance Commissioners. For each state (except California, where most health insurers report to a state agency other than the Insurance Commissioner), the study computed the number of individuals with coverage (in terms of enrollee-years), the number of insurers offering coverage, and the medical loss ratios (recomputed to reflect differences between ACA’s definition of MLR and that used by the NAIC).

Based on this data, the study went on to estimate the number of enrollees in plans failing the ACA’s 80 percent threshold, and the number of higher-risk individuals who might have difficulty in finding coverage if their insurer exited the market. At first sight, the findings seem dramatic and very different from the expectations of the MLR provision’s Senate authors. The AJMC article estimates that in nine states (Arkansas, Illinois, Louisiana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, Wyoming, and West Virginia) at least half of the individual health insurers missed the 80 percent threshold in 2009, while in twelve states (Arkansas, Arizona, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, New Hampshire, Nevada, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia) more than half of the enrollees were covered by insurers failing the standard, with some two million individuals nationally covered by such insurers. The study then projected that overall more than a hundred thousand enrollees (with more than ten thousand in each of Florida, Illinois, Texas, and Virginia) would find it difficult or impossible to find coverage if their non-MLR-compliant insurers exited the market. If the study’s findings are accurate, somewhere between a dozen and twenty states could reasonably demand waivers of the individual market MLR standard.

However, as the authors note, there were significant study limitations as well as possible source data inaccuracies. Enrollment in health plans offered by life insurers was generally omitted, as was all data from California. Additionally, the findings are dependent on state reporting to the NAIC, something that some of the data shown in the article suggests may be unreliable. For example, Maine—the only state so far granted an MLR waiver—is shown as having an average MLR well above the 80 percent threshold, while insurers in Michigan are shown as having an average MLR in excess of 1.0 in both 2002 and 2009—an unlikely consistently money-losing trend in a large state. Continue reading…

The Obamacare Shift

A colleague pointed this out to me recently, and I think he has it right: While more people will have health insurance as a result of the federal health care reform act, a side effect will be to reduce the number of people insured through the employer-based insurance plans that have characterized the US health care system. These people will either be insured as individuals through the state exchanges that are to be established or, if eligible, through Medicaid. There are three aspects of economic hydraulics that are likely to lead to this result.

First, the penalty to be assessed against employers for not offering coverage — $2000 per year — is dramatically below the cost of providing insurance. If you are an employers and can save, say, $5,000 by paying $2,000, why wouldn’t you do that? And the $2000 is not even indexed to inflation, while the annual charge for an employer-sponsored plan is likely to go up over time. Hence the differential will grow every year.

In the past, the provision of a health care benefit was viewed as competitive factor in hiring and retaining a firm’s work force. But for the vast majority of businesses, that may be a less important factor than saving a few thousand dollars per employee and being able to offer a portion of those savings in higher wages and/or improving the profitability of the firm. Sure, some businesses might still want to attract workers by having their own semi-customized insurance benefit, but the power of that is likely to diminish over time.

A second factor is that the so-called “Cadillac” tax will make employer-sponsored health care even more expensive if you have a plan with generous benefits. Health coverage in excess of $10,200 for individual plans and $27,500 for family plans will be hit with a 40 percent excise tax on the amount in excess of the floor. The tax is indexed for inflation plus 1 percent.

Finally, to help avoid the excise tax, employers are going to “dumb down” plan designs by raising deductibles and co-pays. As they do so, the substantive difference between their own plans and the ones that will be offered through state exchanges or Medicaid will diminish. Even if you have a residual concern that your workers may want an employer-based plan, their desire might be diminished as you make your plan less attractive, so you lose little in competitiveness by referring them to the non-employer based plans.

There are those who believe that there was an ideological basis for this construct, that the Administration and a majority of Congress wanted people to move away from employer-based health insurance as part of an eventual movement to a federally chartered single-payer regime. Others say that it is just an natural extension of a bill that created important protections — benefit mandates, a floor for medical loss ratios, guaranteed issue, restrictions on medical underwriting — all of which act to increase the cost of insurance products.Continue reading…

Healthcare Insurance Future: Brokers, Consultants, Agents

When people and companies buy healthcare insurance, they usually go through a broker, a consultant, or an agent.

Agents sell insurance from one company, brokers from many companies; both make a commission—a percentage of the premium. Consultants take a fee from the client to help them set up their insurance situation, then typically turn around and hand the business to a broker or agent to handle the actual sale.

As premiums have skyrocketed, that’s been good for brokers and agents, since they get a percentage of that. As health insurance offerings have gotten both more expensive and complex, that’s been good for consultants; employers increasingly feel that they need a professional helping them sort out their choices.

How will their situation change under the looming reform—not to mention the deep reorganization that healthcare is going through at the same time?  It’s a “Good News/Bad News” story.

There are five key factors here:

1. Market expansion: It’s got to be a good thing when your market gets tax credits for buying your product—let alone when everyone has to buy what you’re selling or get fined, right?

2. Less risk: One reason why people go to professionals for their insurance is that the consequences of making a mistake about what’s covered, can you get covered, or will you get kicked out “rescinded,” can be huge. If everyone can get covered for everything and you can’t get kicked out of the plan, signing up for healthcare insurance is less risky—so buyers may feel less need to involve a broker or consultant.

Continue reading…

Mau-Mauing the Medical Loss Ratio

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Senator Max Baucus recently admitted that he never read the new health care law. But that hasn’t stopped him from trying to re-write it after the fact, in a way that would drive more health plans from the market and give consumers less choice.

The new law reduces choice of health plans by giving government the power to control the Medical Loss Ratio (MLR) — the amount of dollars an insurer spends on medical care divided by the total premiums. Policies that cover large businesses will have to achieve an MLR of 85 percent, while those for small businesses and individuals will have to achieve an MLR of 80 percent. This sounds simple but leaves many issues unresolved.

Calculating he MLR can be quite complicated — especially when the government gets involved. Suppose, for example, an insurer invests in information technology that it gives to patients or providers in its network in order to improve co-ordination of care. Is that a medical cost?

Furthermore, the MLR regulation is deadly for increasingly popular consumer-directed plans. Suppose a traditional policy costs $4,000 and spends $3,400 on patient care, for an MLR of 85.00. With the consumer-directed policy, the patient controls $800 more of the medical spending than with the traditional policy, through a higher deductible, and his premium goes down by $800. In this case the MLR goes down to 81.25 ($2,600/$3,200). There is no real difference, but the new regulation could require insurers to rebate $120 — the amount by which the ratio falls short of the required MLR. (In real life, the consumer-directed plan would have lower total costs than in this simple arithmetical example, because cutting out the middleman and giving more health dollars to patients to control themselves motivates them to get better value for money.)

Continue reading…

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