[…] But the reason I have health insurance is to protect our family in the event of a catastrophic illness or injury. If that were to happen, I want to know that I have a real health insurance company paying my bills, and legal recourse in the event of a dispute. I like knowing that my health insurance policy is regulated by Colorado’s Division of Insurance, and I like the fact that it doesn’t say “this is not health insurance” anywhere on my policy information. […]
Health Care Goodies
Some Confusion Around New Colorado High Risk Pool
The new Colorado health insurance program for people with pre-existing conditions is supposed to become available next week, but there seems to still be a lot of confusion about how it’s going to work. Since Colorado already has a policy available for people with pre-existing conditions (Cover Colorado), we are one of the states that is opting to use the federal money to set up another risk pool for applicants who cannot qualify for medically underwritten individual policies […]
Colorado Ranks Highly In Women’s Health
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. […]
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. […]
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.
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. […]
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.
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). […]
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. […]
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. […]
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. […]
An Alternative To Rescission
[…] One way or another, my guess is that if all individual health insurance policies had to be thoroughly underwritten at the time of application, health insurance carriers would figure out a way to make the process as efficient as possible. And the happy result would be that if people were approved for coverage, they could rest assured that there would be no possibility of rescission in their future. It’s likely that thorough underwriting would result in more people being declined for coverage, but at least those people would then have the option of applying for coverage through a high risk pool like Cover Colorado. […]
When Less Is More
[…] The problem is that health insurance companies are paying for care with premium dollars collected from insureds, and as costs go up, so do premiums. Until we shift our attitude to a “less is more” mentality, we’re going to continue to see an increase in the cost of care, and subsequently in the cost of health insurance. But it’s not just about money. Articles like Maggie’s should give us a reason to question excessive screening and testing, simply from a standpoint of having a better quality of life. The fact that it could drive down health care costs is a bonus.
Expanding Access To Health Insurance For People With Disabilities
[…] Will guaranteed issue health insurance – and subsidies to help pay for it – starting in 2014 also help to decrease the number of people receiving SSDI? If people had a way to obtain affordable health insurance without having to qualify as disabled, it stands to reason that there would be more incentive for people to return to work after a serious illness or injury.
Not Enough Doctors Choosing Geriatrics
[…] There’s a pretty obvious need for a dramatic increase in the number of medical students entering the field of geriatrics, and it is a bit perplexing as to why the health care reform legislation didn’t put more emphasis on loan repayments and other financial incentives to encourage doctors to pursue a career in geriatrics. My guess is that as the shortage of geriatricians becomes more pressing over the next few years, we might see some additional funding aimed at solving the problem.
Health Care Reform From A Doctor’s Perspective
[…] So unless rationing (explained in a positive light) becomes the industry standard for doctors, I doubt that any one doctor could make much of a difference, since people who are used to getting what they want from their doctors might just seek out another doctor. Hopefully as time goes by and more people understand the lack of sustainability with regards to health care costs, more people will be willing to consider the possibility that some forms of rationing in health care might be a good thing after all.
CBO Numbers Convince Colorado Rep To Vote Yes
Colorado Representative Betsy Markey has announced that she will vote yes on the health care reform bill on Sunday, following her no vote last November. The new CBO numbers that were released this week apparently had a lot to do with her decision; she stated that reducing the deficit by “$138 billion in the first 10 years, $1.2 trillion in the second 10 years — those are figures I simply cannot ignore.” The CBO numbers are better than expected, and will likely convince some fence-riding Democrats to vote for the bill. […]
A Good Start With Colorado Senate Bill 115
[…] Ultimately, I’d like to see us reach a point where medication waste is virtually eliminated. Medication bottles that allow pills to be removed but not re-inserted, or a switch to only using blister packs for pills, could allow even partially used prescriptions to be returned to pharmacies for redistribution. And with the cost of prescriptions becoming more of a barrier between patients and needed treatment, the destruction of perfectly good unused medication seems like a travesty.
Starting Over Seems Like A Waste
Last week’s seven hour health care summit was basically a rehash of the ideas that were tossed around throughout the last year of health care reform debate. Neither party seems willing to negotiate much more in terms of the nitty gritty of the reform, and it’s looking like the Dems might try to use reconciliation to push through their reform bill. […]
Putting Costs Into Perspective
[…] even if we redistributed income and expenses completely, so that every household in American earned exactly $50,000/year and spent exactly $15,000 on health care, we’d still be struggling to pay for health care (only in that scenario, we’d ALL be struggling, rather than the way it is now, with some families crushed completely by health care expenses, and others unaware of how much their health care costs in the first place).