Tag: "health insurance"

Insurance Matters: Children

Children with public insurance (Medicaid or CHIP) or who had no coverage are at least 22 percent less likely than those with private insurance to receive testing or to undergo procedures when they visit the hospital emergency departments, researchers from Children’s Hospital Boston found. In addition, children with no insurance are less likely to receive any medication than children with public or private insurance.

That disparity did not hold true for kids diagnosed with a significant illness, who had the same odds of being admitted to the hospital regardless of insurance status.

Full study in the Journal of Pediatrics. KHN summary by Jenny Gold.

May 15, 2012 | 3 comments | by

Insurance Companies: Without a Mandate We Are Going to Get Creamed

AHIP today released the first in a series of four state case studies examining states’ experiences with implementing market reforms without getting everyone covered. The first case study examines Washington State’s experience and shows that consumers experienced higher premiums and loss of choice following the enactment of guarantee issue without an individual mandate in the 1990′s. The full study can be viewed here and an accompanying press release can be found here. We will be releasing the next three state case studies over the course of the next several weeks.

This is from AHIP.

May 14, 2012 | 5 comments | by

Shopping for Care

Castlight Health [is a] nascent health care start-up…with the goal of giving insurance subscribers meaningful information on health care costs. Castlight, in the simplest terms, wants to bring comparison shopping to health care.

It launched, last year, a Web site where employees on [Health Saving Account] plans can compare what doctors charge for the same service. The site…also includes other patients’ quality rankings of doctors, alongside information on what remains in an individual’s account.

More from Sarah Kliff at Ezra Klein’s blog.

May 02, 2012 | 2 comments | by

Dropping Health Insurance, and Other Links

Consultants to employers: drop health insurance.

Does the president have an “enemies list”?

A tribute to Milton Friedman. HT: Greg Mankiw.

More than 70 percent of people who abuse prescription pain relievers obtain the drugs from friends or relatives, usually with permission and for free.

Hospital debt collectors catch deadbeats in the emergency room and in hospital beds.

May 01, 2012 | 5 comments | by

The Coming Generational Warfare

The average monthly Social Security check is now $1,230. It is not subject to the employment tax and at age 65 you also get great health insurance for only $99.90 a month.

Workers at McDonald’s, which is hiring, earn about $8 an hour, pay the employment tax and, most often, don’t get health insurance…

We need to start worrying about whether millions of uninsured low wage workers will be capable of supporting the growing millions of well insured retirees who no longer work.

Source: Scott Burns.

Apr 27, 2012 | 6 comments | by

A Great Idea from Carly Fiorina

The problem:

Unlike private insurance, it built a system requiring monthly updates of each of its 50 million recipients’ eligibility, including filled-out and faxed-in monthly reports, income receipts, etc.

This requires an army of workers to process piles of eligibility paperwork. Over the years, as the program grew, so did the administrative staff… California’s health care agency reported that it employs a full-time staff of 27,300 to monitor and implement its Medicaid, financial aid and food stamp programs. At an average annual cost of $110,000 per employee, California is budgeting more than $3 billion yearly for administration. That’s money not spent on medical care, food stamps, or the financial assistance — just on the cost to watch over these programs.

The solution:

When people without insurance seek treatment, a trained staff member could simply go to an online address, input basic patient data, and check for available options and whether their income (checked online as it is now with the IRS) qualifies them for government services. This point-of-care enrollment would provide automated checkpoints for eligibility and implement a transparent system with fraud controls.

More on Carly Fiorina’s idea in USA Today.

Apr 17, 2012 | 3 comments | by

High Deductible Health Insurance

Question: If I asked you to point to the most obvious examples of wasteful health care spending, where would you direct me? This is a no brainer. There is nothing more wasteful than first-dollar health insurance coverage. Even deductibles as low as $1,000 or $1,500 are incredibly wasteful in many places. By that I mean that if you choose a higher deductible, the premium savings is greater than the additional expense you are exposed to. That means you can put some of the premium savings in the bank to cover the additional risk exposure (dollar-for-dollar) and still come out ahead.

Second question: When is the last time you saw an article in Health Affairs or any other health policy journal pointing out this obvious way to eliminate waste? My guess is that your answer is “never.” I’m sure you have seen articles about the hazards of high deductible insurance. Why are the journals so reluctant to focus on the benefits?

Every serious study that has ever been done on the subject has found that patients spend less on health care when they are spending their own money. The latest study by the RAND Corporation estimates that families with high deductible plans and Health Savings Accounts spend about 30% less than families with conventional insurance. And that’s with HSA plans designed by Congress. Think how much more effective the accounts could be if they were designed by the marketplace.

Further, no patient group was harmed by the switch to high-deductible insurance — not even vulnerable populations. This echoes the earlier findings of the RAND Health insurance experiment more than 30 years ago.

Ooh I’m driving my life away,
looking for a better way,
for me

Apr 09, 2012 | 47 comments | by

If the Supreme Court Kills ObamaCare, Should We Thank Mitt Romney?

There is no doubt that the campaign to “repeal and replace” ObamaCare will have its weakest standard bearer if Mitt Romney becomes the Republican candidate for President. His embrace of an “individual mandate” to buy health insurance or pay a penalty, as legislated in his 2006 Massachusetts health reform, is anathema to those faithful to the ideal of limited government. When Mr. Romney declares that he will issue a universal waiver from ObamaCare’s regulations as his first executive order, the people who should be voting for him fear that such action would be a substitute for repeal, instead of a preparation for it. (Do these folks really think a clean repeal bill, like the one passed by the House of Representatives in January 2010, will be on the president’s desk on inauguration day?)

But maybe we should look at it another way: If Mitt Romney had never signed his 2006 law (which was motivated, as the president’s men are so fond of telling us, but an idea generated at The Heritage Foundation), those of us committed to defeating ObamaCare would never be in the fortunate position we are today – the whole, ungodly mess hanging by a thin thread after a brutal hazing in the Supreme Court last week.

Apr 06, 2012 | 5 comments | by

John Cochrane Nails It

The country can have a vibrant market for individual health insurance. Insurance proper is what pays for unplanned large expenses, not for regular, predictable expenses. Insurance policies should be “guaranteed renewable”: The policy should include a right to purchase insurance in the future, no matter if you get sick. And insurance should follow you from job to job, and if you move across state lines.

Why don’t we have such markets? Because the government has regulated them out of existence.

Entire editorial in The Wall Street Journal worth reading.

Apr 05, 2012 | 13 comments | by

What is the Case for a Health Insurance Mandate?

The center piece of the Obama administration’s case for an individual health insurance mandate is the argument that people with private insurance pay for care for the uninsured through “cost shifting”—higher prices charged by doctors and hospitals to recover losses from uncompensated care.

So how much cost shifting is there? John Cogan, Glenn Hubbard and Dan Kessler reviewed the evidence the other day in the Wall Street Journal.

There are, surprisingly, few peer-reviewed studies of the magnitude of alleged cost shifting at the national level. A study conducted by George Mason University Prof. Jack Hadley and John Holahan, Teresa Coughlin and Dawn Miller of the Urban Institute, and published in the journal Health Affairs in 2008, found that “Private insurance premiums are at most 1.7 percent higher because of the shifting of the costs of the uninsured to private insurance.” For the typical insurance plan, this amounts to approximately $80 per year.

[A]nother recent peer- reviewed study by Massachusetts Institute of Technology economists Jonathan Gruber and David Rodriguez and published in the Journal of Health Economics, found no evidence that doctors charged insured patients higher fees to cover the cost of caring for the uninsured.

Mar 29, 2012 | 7 comments | by
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