[…] It’s hard to have an effective dialog about costs and cost-control when the average person has no idea what the costs actually are, and no realistic way of finding out. EOBs are great, but they only come after a person has received treatment, and thus aren’t particularly useful in terms of comparison shopping. Kefalas’ bill would be a good step towards transparency in health care costs, and I hope it is well received.
Health Insurance Might Be Less Expensive Than You Think
Gary VanderArk and Gretchen Hammer, president and executive director of the Colorado Coalition for the Medically Underserved, have written an opinion piece for the Denver Post about how health care reform will benefit the people of Colorado. I agree with their analysis – there will be a lot positive changes once health care reform takes effect, especially for low-income Coloradans and those who are currently uninsured […]
Colorado Legislative Sessions Opens With Health Insurance Reform Bills
The 2010 legislative session in Colorado got underway this week, and included the introduction of a few bills aimed at health insurance reform on a state level. HB 1008 would make it illegal for gender to be used in the determination of health insurance premiums, HB 1021 would require reproductive services to be covered by health insurance, and HB 1004 would implement standardized explanation of benefit (EOB) forms for insureds. […]
Transparency Lacking In Final Health Care Negotiations
Both of the Senators from Colorado are calling for more transparency in the way congressional leaders are working to hash out a health care reform plan that combines the versions passed last year by the House and Senate. Senators Udall and Bennet, both Democrats, are unimpressed with their own party’s actions in keeping the final negotiations secret. […]
Cavalcade Of Risk – The New Year Edition
Welcome to the first Cavalcade of Risk in 2010. There is a lot of great reading in this one; let’s start the party with something fresh and new… healthcare […]
Free Preventive Care Is Not Really Free
[…] In Colorado, a similar law took effect last week, requiring health insurance companies to cover various preventive care at the level of the policy co-insurance. It will be interesting to see how this law impacts both premium and health in Colorado over the next few years. Will more people seek out preventive care? Will we be healthier as a result? Will our health insurance premiums increase even more than they already do? We’ll have to wait and see.
Comparing Health Care Costs And Outcomes
van Falchuk has written a very thoughtful article about a recent graph created by National Geographic. At first glance, the implications of the graph are startlingly obvious: the US spends way too much on health care, a view that has been widely repeated throughout the health care reform debate. But Evan’s detailed analysis of the graph does make one pause to consider whether the graph might be over-simplifying things. […]
Lowering Demand For Health Care Through Prevention
[…] But the government can create policies that make the good choices easier and less expensive than the bad choices, and that just might make a difference. Perhaps the next step in health care reform should be working to make Americans healthier to begin with, rather than trying to figure out how to fix us after we get sick.
Health Care Reform In Politically Divided Colorado
[…] For lawmakers in Colorado, nothing is a given when it comes to statewide legislation. There are particular areas of the state that are predominately Democrat or Republican, but when it comes to passing a measure that impacts the whole state, both sides have their work cut out for them. For swing states like Colorado, the passage of federal health care reform will be just the beginning of another intense round of debates.
Socioeconomic Status And Wait Times For Health Care
Critics of the current health care reform efforts have consistently pointed to the longer wait times to see a specialist when one is ill in Canada or Europe, compared with the US (of course, for people with no health insurance at all, wait times are probably considerable here too). Jason Shafrin has written an interesting article about wait times to see a specialist in Europe, and the role that socioeconomic status plays. […]
Pilot Programs Might Be The Key To Cost Control
[…] It’s easy to criticize the length of the health care reform bills (and I would agree that it would be more helpful if they were written in plain English), but perhaps they are so long simply because there is such a wealth of ideas contained within them. It will take the test of time to determine which of those ideas are true winners, but without including them in the language of the bills, we’ll never know.
Health Is About More Than Health Insurance
[…] Data like this indicates that simply providing health insurance to everyone is not the key to actually improving our overall health (which should really be the end goal of health care reform). Providing real access to health care should indeed be the first step, but it is far from the last step. Personal responsibility plays a huge part in protecting our health, but so do government policies. Hopefully health care – and the real preservation of health – will continue to be a priority.
Dentists And HIV Screening
[…] Even if the cost of the test is only counted towards a patient’s deductible (as might be the case if the patient has an HSA qualified plan, for example), just knowing that it will be billed to the health insurance company might make a patient more likely to get the test. In addition, billing the test to a health insurance company is likely to result in a lowered final price for the patient based on network negotiated rates. All around, it makes sense for dental offices that provide HIV screening to be able to bill a patient’s health insurance company for the test.
HSA Helps To Balance Emergency Savings With Investing
[…] The number of people with HSA qualified plans has been steadily increasing over the last few years, and the plans are very popular with our Colorado clients who purchase their own health insurance. For anyone who doesn’t want to have to choose between investing and saving for a medical emergency, HSAs are a perfect fit.
Average Total Premium Not The Same As What Families Really Pay
[…] We know that there are families out there who are paying more than a thousand dollars a month for their health insurance. But they are the exception rather than the rule. The Daily Kos article makes it sound like the average family will end the year with nearly $7000 in their pockets from premium savings, and that just doesn’t add up.
Lessons From The Taiwanese Health Insurance System
[…] job of convincing people that we really don’t need a lot of the health care services that are currently viewed as essential. 16% of our GDP is spent on health care, tens of millions of Americans have no health insurance and have to rely on free clinics and crowded emergency rooms for care, more than half of all bankruptcies in this country stem from medical problems… all of this, and our life expectancy is only a few weeks longer than that of people in Taiwan.
Expanding Medicare Would Require Additional Taxes
[…] No insurance company – public or private – can withstand a significant influx of sick insureds without balancing it out by adding additional healthy insureds. That’s why the mandate requiring everyone to purchase health insurance is a necessary part of the reform bills that would require health insurance companies to accept all applicants, regardless of health history.
Health Insurance Across State Lines Not As Simple As It Sounds
[…] I’m not opposed to the idea of health insurance companies that could operate on a national basis, allowing people to keep their health insurance if they move to another state. But such a plan would have to be overseen by federal guidelines. Simply opening things up to allowing health insurance companies to base themselves in any state they choose, operate under that state’s laws, and sell health insurance in all states, would take us to the lowest common denominator in terms of consumer protections.
Maternity Coverage And Access To Midwifery Care
[…] Amy Romano has written an outstanding article comparing modern American maternity care with SUVs. Since maternity care takes up such a huge portion of our health care budget, this article is a worthwhile read for anyone concerned about the spiraling cost of health care. Hopefully the points that Amy makes will be taken into consideration when lawmakers decide what services should be covered by all health insurance policies.
Why Health Care Reform Is Important
[…] Basically, we can’t have it both ways. If we want smaller government, we have to accept that it comes with fewer regulations. And that means more control in the hands of industry and less in the hands of consumers. If we want regulation over things like premium increases and pre-existing condition limitations, we have to accept that it means more government intervention. In the case of health care and health insurance, we’ve obviously got some flaws in our current system. In some states, a person without access to an employer-sponsored health insurance policy cannot get coverage at all. That is a problem any way you look at it.
Yes, some of the problems stem from personal irresponsibility (although hopefully mandatory health insurance will help to address this issue). But some of the problems are built into the health care system, and that is why reform in the shape of government intervention is such an important task. Because a consumer versus an industry isn’t really a fair match-up.
Reform Worth The Costs
[…] Because individual policies are medically underwritten in Colorado, and because our family is healthy, the individual option is quite a bit less expensive than a group policy would be.
If the health care reform bill makes it through the senate and ends up becoming law, that will probably change. We’ll still have a few more years of the status quo, but in 2013 we’ll likely see significantly higher premiums for those of us who are healthy and buy our own health insurance. The difference in premium between a group plan and an individual plan for our family will likely be much less than it is today, due to both the increased benefit mandates and the end of medical underwriting that is expected in the individual market […]
Premiums In The Individual Market
[…] I think that perhaps the WSJ article confused average group health insurance premiums with those in the individual market. Under current law, which allows for medical underwriting in most states, individual health insurance is significantly less expensive than group coverage – for those who can qualify based on medical history. If we end up with reform that adds additional mandatory coverage (like maternity care) to all individual policies and requires coverage to be guaranteed issue without mandating that everyone be part of the insurance pool, we might well end up with premiums for individual policies that are similar to what was mentioned in the WSJ article. But for now, individual health insurance premiums aren’t even close to that amount.
Surtax Not That Much Of A Burden
[…] But let’s look at the actual impact of the tax as it’s currently written in the Senate bill. It wouldn’t take effect until the beginning of 2013, so wealthy Americans would have three years to squirrel away savings before they had to start paying a little extra in taxes. And the actual amount of the tax is set at half of a percent of income above the $200,000 threshold. Let’s consider a CEO who earns a million dollars a year, filing on his own. $800,000 of her income would be subject to the healthcare surtax, at a rate of 0.5 percent. Half of one percent is not a large chunk of anything. In this case, it would amount to $4,000 ($800,000 times 0.005). So we would be asking a person earning a million dollars a year to kick in an extra $4000 to help pay for healthcare. My vote? That is perfectly fair. Her million dollar a year salary puts her above nearly every other American in terms of earnings, and $4000 doesn’t make much of a dent in a million dollars. […]
Not All States Have A Guaranteed Issue Option
[…] High risk pools are definitely better than nothing, but they don’t solve all insurance problems for people who have pre-existing conditions, and they don’t exist at all in some states. One of the aims of reform ought to include truly making health insurance available – in all states – to all applicants who want to purchase it. If we make all health insurance policies guaranteed issue (without also significantly expanding the pool of healthy insureds via a strong mandate), we’ll likely see higher costs for all insureds. But a good start would be to make sure that everyone, regardless of where they live, has access to at least one guaranteed issue health insurance policy (and no, discount plans and limited benefit policies don’t count).
Chamber Of Commerce Short On Solutions
The Chamber of Commerce has been vehemently opposed to the health care reform bills that have been debated in the House and Senate this year, so it isn’t much of a surprise to see that they are raising money to pay an economist who can “prove” that the proposed reform would increase unemployment and harm the US economy […]