After six years of Obamacare and three years of the exchanges Americans have learned a few lessons. The healthcare.gov disaster was due to the complexity of the website, an awful procurement system, and lack of adequate management by the administrationg. Establishing an insurance company is more than just paying claims, as you can see with the failure of half of the co-op insurers around the country. Finally, people don’t want to spend a lot of money on insurance.
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The Association of Medical Colleges released a report that says America will be short a million doctors by 2025 and that the shortage of primary care physicians makes up a third of that number. There are several reasons for the shortage of primary care physicians including “fee for service” payment model and the mandate for doctors to switch to electronic health records (EHR), which is a time consuming, costly addition to physician’s duties.
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Obamacare created a system that actually made insurance more expensive, decreasing access to the poor and sick, while pricing out average Americans from affordable health care coverage. Millions more have been added to Medicaid, millions have seen double or triple their annual premiums and millions have opted not to be insured at all.
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Only the top five insurers have profits in excess of $1 billion. All the others had 2014 profits of less than $300 million. But the top five also have membership of at least 20 million, with Humana being the lowest (21.4 million) and CIGNA and UnitedHealthGroup having the highest (86 and 85 million members worldwide, respectively).
When you divide a figure measured in billions by membership measured in many millions, the resultant is rather modest. The average Fortune 500 health insurer earned profits of only $51 per member in 2014. Thus we could trim the monthly health insurance premium by about $4.25 were we to confiscate all those “obscene profits” and give them back to plan members.
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In the March 8 rule, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) stated that Health Savings Account (HSA) eligibility was not a meaningful distinction for health plans because consumers can determine whether a plan is HSA-qualified by examining a plan’s cost-sharing amounts. Therefore, it will not require HSA-qualified plans to be designated as such.
Two main reasons why HSA-qualified plans will not survive is because plans must cover services below the deductible that are not considered “preventative care.” And the plans must apply specific deductibles and out-of-pocket limits that are outside the requirements for HSA-qualified plans.
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Highmark Health lost $590 million in its health plans that were sold on the ACA exchange in 2015. Highmark is still owed $500 million under the risk-corridor program, and HHS has said it will find a way to fund the program. Highmark Health CEO, David Holmberg said Highmark has met with government officials “regularly to discuss how they plan to honor their commitment.”
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Despite the extraordinarily large growth in Medicaid spending and the evidence that much of that spending is of low value to enrollees, the president is requesting more than $100 billion in additional Medicaid spending over the next decade.
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Obama promised that Obamacare would “save all of us money and reduce pressures on emergency rooms all across the country.” However, a new report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows, that by doling out insurance coverage to millions more people without doing anything to address America’s growing doctor shortage, the president’s health reform law may make the ER crisis even worse.
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The Affordable Care Act has created many problems and the American people are left with rising costs, and higher taxes, mountains of red tape, and arrogant bureaucratic attacks on personal and religious liberty.
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Employers that offer a health savings account might gain a competitive advantage in employee recruitment and retention. An HSA can significantly reduce employees’ taxes while giving them an important investment option, making an HSA a valuable financial wellness tool, writes Liz Ryan. HSAs can be offered as a long-term benefit like a 401(k) as well as an emergency fund for unexpected expenses, Ryan writes.
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