Colorado is the only state in a recent report by HealthGrades to rank in the top ten for all three aspects of women’s care studied (see appendix D on page 15 of the report). Although only three hospitals in Colorado received the HealthGrades 2009/2010 Women’s Health Excellence Award: North Colorado Medical Center in Greeley, Poudre Valley Hospital in Fort Collins, and Centura Health-Penrose Saint Francis Health Services in Colorado Springs. […]
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Instant Billing Long Overdue
I have often thought that an instant billing/payment system for medical offices (sort of a Visa/Mastercard type of setup between providers and health insurance carriers) was long-overdue. This New York Times article details exactly how such a system could work, but also addresses some of the problems it would face. The main issue is the complicated nature of health insurance billing, with thousands of medical codes that the doctor’s office has to sort through in order to correctly submit a bill. […]
Colorado Delaying Medicaid Payments
[…] And that means that Medicaid claims submitted over the last couple weeks won’t be paid until July 9th – providers will miss out on payments that were scheduled for last week and later this week. The 2011 fiscal year begins in July, and the state is planning to push Medicaid reimbursements out in order to contain the budget for this year. The money will eventually be paid to the providers, but for book-keeping purposes it will be in a different fiscal year, and it also amounts to an interest-free short term loan from the providers to the state. […]
Colorado Governor Ritter At Odds With Attorney General Suthers
Colorado is an interesting place to be this summer, as the health care reform debate continues to play out – in the courts now, rather than in town halls and legislative sessions. Our Attorney General, Republican John Suthers, is part of the group of AGs from 20 states who are challenging the legality of a federal mandate requiring people to have health insurance. And our Governor, Bill Ritter Jr., is one of four Democratic governors of those states who disagree with the position taken by the Attorneys General. […]
Early Retiree Reinsurance Program Application Available From HHS
[…] There are an estimated 62,700 people in Colorado who retired before they were eligible for Medicare and are receiving retiree health care benefits from their former employers. Their employers can now apply for financial assistance to help cover the cost of health care for their early retirees, and the financial assistance can be passed along to the retirees in the form of lower health care costs.
IRS 2011 HSA Contribution Funding Limits
The IRS has just issued Revenue Procedure 2010-22, which outlines the 2011 cost-of-living contribution and coverage adjustments for HSAs, as mandated under Code Section 223(g). The limits for 2011 are unchanged from 2010.
HDHP Minimum Deductible:
You must still have coverage under an HSA-qualified “high deductible health insurance plan” (HDHP) to open and contribute to an HSA. Federal law still requires that in 2011 the health insurance deductible be at least […]
Barbara Bush Believes Health Care Is A Right
[…] People who can least afford to pay large sums of money out of pocket for health care are the ones most likely to have to do so. Medicaid is there for the lowest income earners, but some states are very restrictive in terms of income levels required to qualify for Medicaid. Colorado has started to expand access to Medicaid and Child Health Plan Plus (CHP+) but this is not the case in all states. And people on the lower end of the income spectrum are far more likely to be uninsured than those on the higher end. […]
Health Insurance Carriers Continuing To Improve
A year ago I wrote an article about how health insurance companies were generally doing a better job in 2008 of paying claims faster and denying fewer claims than they did in 2007. The annual Athena Health study results are now out for 2009, and overall there was another significant increase in the speed with which health insurance companies paid claims (7 days faster than in 2008) and a decline among most payers in terms of the percentage of claims denied. […]
Radiation Exposure From Medical Testing
I just read a rather alarming article about the dramatic increase in radiation exposure from medical tests over the last couple decades. We get more medical radiation than people in any other country – in fact, half of the world’s advanced imaging procedures that use radiation are done in the US. And the average American’s radiation exposure from medical testing has grown sixfold in the last twenty years. […]
Fair Pay For Our Doctors
[…] The PCP shortage is likely to become even more of a problem once the health care reform provisions kick in and millions of currently uninsured Americans become insured and presumably start to seek out more health care. Unless we can make primary care more attractive to people in medical school, all of those newly insured people are going to end up seeing expensive specialists instead of PCPs, and the burden of paying for health care will only become harder to bear.
Paying Doctors To Not See Patients
[…] The problem with concierge-style medical practices now is the relatively large retainer fee that patients have to pay in order to join. It’s really only available to those at the top end of the income scale, and generally not covered by health insurance. But maybe the idea should get another look. Maybe we should be looking at the idea of health insurance companies reimbursing doctors for keeping patients healthy, rather than just caring for us after we become sick.
Continuous Coverage Does Not Eliminate Underwriting
[…] People with pre-existing medical conditions can get guaranteed issue coverage through Cover Colorado, but are definitely not “guaranteed access to the individual market”. When a person with pre-existing conditions applies for an individual policy in Colorado (and in most other states), the insurance company can deny the application, place exclusions on the pre-existing conditions, or offer the policy at a higher initial rate based on medical history. It doesn’t matter whether the applicant has had continuous coverage or not. […]
Spiraling Prescription Drug Use In Kids
[…] The thought of 30 percent of adolescents being on medication for chronic conditions should make us all sit up and take notice. Hopefully it will fuel the cry for better school lunches and increased attention to prevention of obesity and mental health problems in kids. As a society, we simply cannot afford to continue to increase our utilization of prescription drugs.
Colorado Governor Signs Bill Requiring Maternity Coverage On All Policies
Governor Bill Ritter signed Colorado House Bill 1021 into law last week, instituting what I consider to be one of the most significant changes to health insurance law in recent years. The law will require all health insurance policies in Colorado to provide coverage for both maternity care and contraception, starting next year. Without this law, people who purchase individual health insurance have very little in the way of options for maternity coverage. […]
Healthcare Continuing To Take A Larger Chunk Of Family Budgets
[…] Premiums for health insurance in the individual market are lower than those in the group market, but there’s no employer paying a portion of the premium. And the premiums alone amount to 10% of household income. When you add in the deductibles and other out of pocket expenses, it’s not surprising at all that nearly half of everyone buying insurance in the individual market was considered high-burden in 2006 (spending more than 10% of household income on health care). […]
Disability Insurance Awareness Month
[…] May is disability insurance awareness month, and it’s a good reminder to consider how well you’re protecting your greatest asset – your earning potential. Working adults are more likely to encounter a disability that prevents them from working for at least 90 days than they are to die, and yet people tend to be more proactive about securing life insurance than disability insurance. […]
Most Emergency Room Patients Have Health Insurance
[…] Finding a doctor who takes Medicaid is significantly more difficult than finding a doctor who takes private health insurance, and I wonder if that might be a contributing factor in the crowding of our emergency rooms. If a person with Medicaid is sick and unable to find a nearby doctor who accepts Medicaid, he might end up not seeing a doctor at all and his condition might worsen to the point of needing emergency room care. Maybe efforts to make Medicaid more attractive to doctors might help to alleviate some of the over-crowding in emergency rooms.
Another Way Exercise Could Lower Health Care Costs
[…] Maybe if doctors and patients were all aware of the fact that exercise is more beneficial in the long term than anti-depressants, we could start to cut down on the number of anti-depressant prescriptions being written. Lower utilization of pharmaceutical products would be helpful in terms of limiting the overall cost of medical claims and thus the price of health insurance as time goes on. […]
Dentists Overprescribing Antibiotics and Avoiding Health Care Reform
[…] MD Whistleblower had a couple good observations:
– Dentists prescribe prophylactic antibiotics (ATBs) with routine recklessness… Many dentists irrationally prescribe ATBs before teeth cleanings and other procedures.
– Not a syllable in the ~2000 page health care reform law that affects dentists.
Demand For HSAs Continuing To Grow
[…] A new report from AHIP notes that the number of Americans covered by HDHP/HSA policies reached 10 million in 2010, up from 8 million last year. In Colorado, 9.2% of the under-65, privately insured population has HSA qualified coverage, which is the third-highest percentage in the nation. A recent study by the Mountain States Employers Council reports that 27% of Colorado employers surveyed are offering consumer-driven health plans this year, up from 21% last year. […]
Focusing On Nutrition To Prevent Cancer
[…] Colorado ranks among the top of the list in terms of how many people eat the recommended amount of produce each day, and yet the vast majority of our adults are not getting the recommended amounts (we only rank near the top because so many other states are doing so much worse). Health care reform has focused largely on expanding access to health insurance for the millions of Americans who are currently uninsured, and that’s a good start. But eliminating tobacco use and increasing access to nutritious food could go a long way in terms of improving the health of the American people.
Colorado Health Insurance Report By The DOI
Last month, the Colorado Division of Insurance released a report on health insurance in the state, and it is definitely be a good read for anyone interested in how health insurance works in Colorado. There are all sorts of interesting facts included. For example, only a third of Coloradans are covered by a health insurance policy that is regulated by the Division of Insurance. The rest are either covered by a self-insured employer plan or a government plan, or are uninsured. […]
Options For Maternity Coverage In Colorado Disappearing Fast
Getting individual health insurance with maternity benefits just got a lot harder for women in Colorado. For the last few years, there have only been three major carriers that offered maternity coverage on individual policies: Golden Rule (United HealthOne), Assurant, and Rocky Mountain Health Plans. As of the end of April 2010, both Golden Rule… Read more about Options For Maternity Coverage In Colorado Disappearing Fast
Balancing Individual And Group Health Insurance After Reform
[…] It remains to be seen how health care reform will actually impact the breakdown of individual versus group health insurance. Currently, there are far more people with group coverage than individual policies. The balance might shift a bit as health care reform takes effect, but I doubt that there will be a mass exodus away from group plans in favor of individual coverage.
Colorado Expanding Access To Medicaid And CHP+
A new state law that imposes fees on hospitals went into effect this week. Over the next few years, it’s expected to allow Colorado to expand access to health insurance to about 150,000 of the state’s 800,000 uninsured residents. The funds generated from the hospital fees will allow Colorado to expand access to Medicaid for adults, increase the income limit to qualify for Medicaid, and expand access to Child Health Plan Plus (CHP+) for children and pregnant women. […]