Tag: "Uninsured"

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 Matters: Young Adults

We exploit a sharp change in insurance coverage rates that results from young adults “aging out” of their parents’ insurance plans to estimate the effect of insurance coverage on the utilization of emergency department (ED) and inpatient services. Aging out results in an abrupt 5 to 8 percentage point reduction in the probability of having health insurance. We find that uninsured status leads to a 40 percent reduction in ED visits and a 61 percent reduction in inpatient hospital admissions.

Paper from the American Economic Journal. Austin Frakt commentary.

May 10, 2012 | 7 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

Medicare Trustee: ObamaCare Will Add $340 Billion to the Deficit

The study is set to be released Tuesday by Charles Blahous, a conservative policy analyst whom Obama approved in 2010 as the GOP trustee for Medicare and Social Security. His analysis challenges the conventional wisdom that the health-care law, which calls for an expensive expansion of coverage for the uninsured beginning in 2014, will nonetheless reduce deficits by raising taxes and cutting payments to Medicare providers.

More from Lori Montgomery in The Washington Post. Democrats respond with personal attacks.

Apr 10, 2012 | 4 comments | by

The Downside of the Massachusetts Mandate

About 120,000 residents of Massachusetts still lack health insurance. The downside for business:

“You have some of those who are truly bad guys and should be fined,” Mr. Fields said. “But the ones that are personal to me are the $50,000 fine that puts my client out of business.”

The downside for individuals:

Roughly 48,000 people in [Massachusetts] were subject to penalties for not having coverage in 2009, the latest year for which figures are available, down from 67,000 in 2007. The maximum penalties range from $228 to $1,212 a year, depending largely on income. (Anyone with an annual income of less than 150% of the federal poverty line pays no penalty.) The penalties are paid on state tax returns.

Source: Abby Goodnough in the NYT.

Apr 09, 2012 | 2 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

Latest Research from Robert Wood Johnson Foundation

RWJ study: state policies that require insurers to allow young adults to enroll as dependents on their parents plan into their mid-20s had no significant impact on the number of uninsured young adults. (HT: Michael Ramlet)

RWJ study: state expansion of CHIP may not have reduced the number of uninsured children. (HT: Michael Ramlet)

Feb 24, 2012 | 4 comments | by

Cheerleading for ObamaCare

The Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) does some very good and objective work on health issues, but sometimes it just can’t help itself and turns into a bubble headed cheerleader for ObamaCare.

The latest example is an essay by KFF president Drew Altman on “Small Area Variations and the ACA’s Coverage expansion.” The point of the essay is that some areas of the country will be much more affected by ObamaCare than others. It’s a fairly obvious point. Even on a state-by-state basis, places like California and Texas with 20% or more uninsured will be more profoundly affected than Massachusetts with 5% or fewer uninsured. Altman takes it further and finds that the level of uninsured within a state varies considerably as well. This is drawn from a study KFF sponsored.

All of this is interesting and worthwhile information. The problem is that in Altman’s telling, the “effect” is an unmitigated “benefit.” He uses the term “benefit” as a verb fifteen times in this very short essay, including five times in a single paragraph:

Feb 22, 2012 | 12 comments | by

With Charity Toward None

On the day an ambulance rushed her to a Manhattan hospital emergency room shortly after her 48th birthday, she was jobless, uninsured and having a stroke.

Ms. Rubel’s medical problem was rare, a result of a benign tumor on her adrenal gland, but the financial consequences were not unusual. She depleted her savings to pay $17,000 for surgery to remove the tumor, and then watched, “emotionally paralyzed,” she said, as $88,000 in additional hospital bills poured in. Eventually the hospital sued her for the money.

Full article on the charity care system in The New York Times.

Feb 15, 2012 | 8 comments | by

Gingrich Uses Goodman to Defend Switch on Mandate

Newt Gingrich told ABC News he supported a health insurance mandate until John Goodman showed him a better idea:

[Goodman] essentially would give you a tax credit if you want to buy insurance, and if you didn’t want to buy insurance your share of the tax credit would go into a pool for the uninsured and if something happened to you, you’d be taken care of by the pool of the uninsured. And so you’d be in a different league in terms of how you were handled and what happened to you.

This was repeated to CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, cited in The Washington Post’s “Fact Checker” blog and noted yesterday by Reason.com.

Dec 14, 2011 | 6 comments | by
Next Page »