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Tag: Wellpoint

How Did We End Up with a Broken Health Insurance System? 

By LEONARD D’ AVOLIO

The murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson has drawn attention to Americans’ frustration with the for profit healthcare insurance industry. Change is possible but less likely if people don’t understand how we got here, the real issues, and how they might be fixed. 

Health insurance wasn’t always run by big for profit corporations 

According to Elizabeth Rosenthal’s book, An American Sickness (a must read), it all started in the 1920s when the Vice President of Baylor University Medical Center discovered that they were carrying a large number of unpaid bills. The goal wasn’t to make money. It was to keep sick people from going bankrupt while helping keep the lights on at not-for-profit hospitals. 

Baylor launched “Blue Cross” as a not-for-profit and it offered one-size-fits-all coverage, one-size-fits-all pricing, and all were welcome. By 1939, Blue Cross grew to 3 million subscribers and health insurance might have stayed this way if it wasn’t for two important innovations that would change healthcare and insurance as we know it.

Before the late 1930s, there wasn’t a heck of a lot we could do for sick people. That all changed with two innovations: 1) the ventilator and 2) the first intravenous anesthetic. The ability to put people to sleep and keep them breathing opened the door to a whole array of new surgical and intensive care interventions. More interventions meant more lives saved. It also meant longer hospital stays, more expensive equipment and care. Insurance would have to evolve to keep up with medical innovation.

We probably could have solved that problem with direct-to-consumer private insurance (like car or life insurance). But World War 2 introduced a creative workaround to a labor shortage that gave employers an outsized role in determining our health. 

Health insurance tied to employment

During World War 2, the National War Labor Board froze salaries and companies faced labor shortages. Employers figured out they could attract employees by offering health insurance. The government encourages this by giving a tax break to employers on health insurance spending.  

The number of Americans with health insurance skyrockets. Between 1940 and 1955, this number increased from 10% to over 60%, with the not-for-profit Blue Cross dominating. It’s hard to believe nowadays, but at the time, an insurance company was one of the most beloved brands in America.

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Anthem Arrogantly Refuses Audit Processes. Twice.

Fred's HeadRecently, I took a bunch of heat for writing that Anthem was right not to encrypt. My point was that the application encryption is just one of several security measures that add up to a security posture, and that we needed to wait until we got more information before condemning Anthem for a poor security posture.

A security posture is the combination of an organization’s overall security philosophy as well as the specific security steps that the organization takes as a result of that philosophy. Basically the type of posture taken shows whether an organization takes security and privacy seriously, or prefers a “window dressing” approach. I argued that simply knowing that the database in question did not have encryption was not enough detail to assess the Anthem security posture.

Well we have more evidence now, and its not looking good for Anthem.

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Make Sense? Competition, Not Higher Premiums, May Turn Out to Be the Biggest Threat to Obamacare Buyers

flying cadeuciiThere have been lots of news reports, including some from me, about insurers raising premiums 10 percent or more on the Obamacare exchanges next year.

But for most people who bought health coverage in the Obamacare exchanges, that’s not really a concern.

That’s because the vast majority of Obamacare buyers so far have received tax credits to reduce the cost of that coverage.

Those subsidies, rather than being flat dollar amounts, fluctuate so customers never pay more than a certain percentage of their incomes on insurance.

In other words, if premiums rise next year like WellPoint Inc. has predicted, subsidies also will rise to keep the net cost to consumers at the same percentage of their income.

So rising premiums aren’t a problem for consumers, unless their income rises so much that it reduces the size of their subsidy.

“If all insurers increase their rates by 10 percent, that might not have a dramatic shift in the market,” said Paul Houchens, a consulting actuary at the Indianapolis health practice of Milliman Inc. “Most of that premium increase is going to be absorbed by the federal government.”

(Rising federal spending could also be a problem for Obamacare–not to mention taxpayers–but that’s not my focus today. Also, Houchens noted, Obamacare’s premiums are not scheduled to rise in line with premiums forever, but will be indexed to income growth and inflation.)

But for 2015, what could cause the biggest problem for Obamacare consumers, Houchens pointed out to me last week, is if an insurer reduces its premiums. Or if a new compeitor enters the market in 2015 with lower premiums than insurers were offering in 2014.

If that idea makes your head spin, welcome to Obamacare, where up is down and down is up—at least compared to how health insurance used to work. It’s what I’ve taken to calling the weightlessness of Obamacare.

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The ACA– As Much As We Could Have Hoped For, Despite Sensible Old Men

The Administration has snatched victory from the jaws of defeat and enrolled 7 million people (give or take a million who may not have paid their premiums) into health plans under the ACA, and more into Medicaid. The Affordable Care Act (ACA) isn’t as big a change as some of us would have liked, But in this moment of modest celebration let’s remember what some of the sensible old men said all along.

Sensible old men said reform couldn’t pass without bring in the Republicans. Sen. Baucus tried hard to do that, and it’s beyond clear that no Republican would have ever supported it–even a moderate like Snowe who was quitting. It passed anyway.

They said that we’d see massive rate shock. Instead plans tightened networks and rates were in general lower than they had been before.

They said that the web site debacle meant no-one would sign up and we’d go into an insurance death spiral. The web site launch was a cock up, but Medicaid expansion (where allowed) has more or less been OK, and the exchange web site(s) now more or less work(s)–outside Oregon & Maryland. By the way this backs my argument for having one Federal exchange, which you may remember was in the House bill before we ended up being forced to take the Senate version due to Ted Kennedy’s death.

One wise old man (Robert Laszewski) was still saying that the exchanges would be financial disaster for insurers the very week Wellpoint raised earnings expectations because they had more enrollees than expected.

Let’s also remember that because of the politics of the nation, the ACA is a ridiculous hodge-podge of a law requiring–you’ll recall:

a) an opt-in to what’s basically a social insurance program (hey, let’s opt-in to fire protection while we’re at it!)

b) arbitrary tax (and now subsidy) distinctions between those who get insurance via an employer and those who don’t, and

c) arbitrary access to insurance (well, Medicaid) for the poor depending on their income and which side of a randomly drawn line they live.

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Good Business Models and Bad Business Models.

You may have received a refund check in the past few months from your health insurer. This is not your individual reward for staying healthy; it is your insurer’s punishment for making too much money because you did.

Obamacare includes what the health care technocracy calls the “MLR rule” – minimum requirements for medical-loss ratios – or the percentage of premiums collected by health insurers that must be spent on medical care or refunded. The inverse of the MLR is the percentage spent on administration and marketing, and earned as profit. Obamacare sets minimum MLRs of 80 percent for individual and small group plans, and 85 percent for large groups.

Aside from its obvious populist appeal, this profit regulation mechanism signifies a belief, now enshrined in legislation, that health insurance markets do not work. Without such a rule, the architects of Obamacare believe, insurers can name their prices, however inflated, and we all just pay.

In the short term, that is true. Most health insurance plans price only once per year, are subject to long delays in cost trending information and multi-year underwriting cycles, and endure the meddling of a carnival midway’s worth of employee benefits tinkerers, agents, brokers, consultants, and other conflicted middlemen. But in the long term, over multiple annual cycles, premiums do rise and fall, and the health insurance industry’s fortunes with them.

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Fools’ Gold Rush: Obamacare And The Medicaid “Opportunity”

You know we’ve gone through the looking glass when the hottest health care money on Wall Street is chasing Medicaid.

No, I didn’t mean Medicare, the $560 billion per year federal program for insuring the elderly that has launched a thousand IPOs. The current darling of health care investors is Medicaid, the hybrid federal-state program for insuring the poor that now dominates, and often overwhelms, state government budgets.

Last month, Wellpoint agreed to pay $4.5 billion for Amerigroup, a Medicaid managed care company, representing a nearly 50% premium over Amerigroup’s market price.  Not to be outdone, Aetna this past week purchased Coventry for $5.7 billion, which also services Medicaid populations. These deals and several others like them rumored to be in the pipeline have driven up the share prices of Amerigroup’s competitors – other Medicaid managed care companies like Centene and Molinas – in anticipation of the latest round of monkey-see, monkey-acquire deals by health insurers.

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Health Insurers & the Affordable Care Act: Extinction or Reinvention?

Now that the Supreme Court has upheld the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), health insurers are scrambling to reinvent themselves for a new era.  In an earlier post, I quoted Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini as saying he wants to create a business model that makes sense under the new rules and regulations.  In a recent speech Bertolini  explained, “We need to move the system from underwriting risk to managing populations.  We want to have a different relationship with the providers, physicians and hospitals we do business with.”

Starting with Aetna, this analysis will examine the ways that insurance companies are trying to reinvent themselves for a reformed health care delivery system that often wonders why we need health insurers at all.

Early this year, Aetna decided to evolve “’from an insurance carrier to a health solutions company.” ”The head of brand and consumer marketing at Aetna stated, “’More and more, the end consumer is who we need to focus on.’” Aetna has developed Care Pass Platform, an agnostic tool that all consumers can use to aggregate and organize their fitness, medical, insurance and nutrition data. Aetna is also partnering with Medicity to provide smartphone apps for providers and iTriage to provide apps for consumers.

The Medical Loss Report: Fiddling while Rome Burns

Today’s headline was “Millions Expected To Receive Insurance Rebates Totaling $1.3 Billion.”

The Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that 3.4 million people in the individual market will receive $426 million in consumer rebates because of the Affordable Care Act’s new MLR rules. In the small group market 4.9 million enrollees will see $377 million in rebates, and 7.5 million people will get $540 million in the large group market.

Wow!

But take a closer look at the report. Only 19% of those in the large group market will be getting a rebate and that rebate will average $72.31 per person. In the small group market 28% of those enrolled in these plans will get a rebate averaging $76.37. And, in the individual market 31% of consumers who have these plans will get a rebate averaging $126.81.

The Wall Street Journal, citing a Goldman analysis, is reporting that Aetna will be paying out $177 million in rebates. But Aetna has $11 billion in premium so that’s only a 1.6% rebate. UnitedHealth will be paying out $307 billion but that is only 1% of its $28.8 billion in premium. Wellpoint will pay out $94 million in rebates but that is only .28% of its premium for the year.

The average cost of employer-provided family health insurance is now about $13,000 per year. A family rebate of perhaps $200 will amount to only about 1.5% of premium for the relatively few people who will even get one.

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Dr. Watson I Presume

Little over a month ago, IBM and WellPoint announced an agreement wherein WellPoint will deploy IBM’s latest and greatest super computer and artificial intelligence mega-mind Watson. Watson’s claim to fame was its ability to beat the human Jeopardy champions much like Big Blue beat reigning chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997. Since that Jeopardy match, IBM has been quite vocal about its desire to apply Watson in the medical arena, we’ve been buried in press releases and briefings, but the WellPoint announcement is the first one of any real consequence. Having interviewed both IBM and WellPoint, following is our review and assessment.

Background:
Watson is a relatively new form of artificial intelligence, based to some extent on neural networks. What is unique about Watson is that it has been developed (trained) to understand the nuances of language. It is a question & answer system that uses among other techniques, natural language processing, to extract meaning out of unstructured data. In developing Watson for the Jeopardy challenge, one of the key design parameters was for Watson to answer a question in under three seconds – plenty fast enough in a diagnosis/treatment decision scenario. This is a key reason why Watson may have enormous utility in the healthcare sector where so much data is unstructured, the pace of change is so high and the ability to chose the optimum treatment patient plan for a given diagnosis is less than ideal today.

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Wellpoint: just incompetent?

I’m viewing the latest rumblings in the US health care debate from the confines of a clear but cold Britain, where the big news is that the country is joining the PIGS in entering economic meltdown—or at least being a lot more broke than it thought it was. (PIGS are Portugal, Greece, Ireland & Spain, not farm animals). And yet it appears that health reform is making if not a comeback then at least vigorous palpitations. The reason for this seems to be the strength that the Anthem Blue Cross/Wellpoint premium rises have imbued into the Administration.

Those of you reading THCB over the years will know that I think the individual insurance market is doomed to fail and should be replaced. It has its apologists; for example Cato’s Michael Cannon here criticizes Paul Krugman who explained last Friday why the individual market goes into a death spiral. Michael claims that Mark Pauly’s research shows that the individual market works. What Pauly’s work (and I despair at having to read it again, so this is from memory) tends to show is that insurers are incompetent at charging sick people to the full extent that they cost them, but do charge them roughly three times what they charge healthy people. Pauly also said in Health Affairs that the individual market works pretty well for 80% of the people in it, but he seems to think that screwing the remaining 20% is OK. Coming from a tenured Ivy league professor who’s probably never had to buy health insurance in his life, that was pretty rich. But apparently Wellpoint’s latest performance shows that it’s not OK for much of the other 80% either—hence their dropping out, leading to Krugman’s death spiral.Continue reading…

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