Arizona has asked the CMS to allow it to end retroactive coverage for Medicaid beneficiaries.
If granted, the waiver request now under review at the CMS, would nix providers’ ability to bill for services provided in the three months before a beneficiary applies for Medicaid coverage, assuming the patient was eligible during that time.
Providers in the state had urged the state not to submit the waiver to the CMS because it could put hospitals in a difficult financial situation and limit access to care.
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A group of Democratic senators on Wednesday introduced an expanded public option for health insurance as the party debates the next steps to build on ObamaCare.
The new proposal, called the Choose Medicare Act, was introduced by Sens. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) and Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), both seen as potential presidential contenders, though Murphy has said he is not running in 2020.
The measure has no real chance of becoming law anytime soon, but is part of a growing debate among Democrats about what the best next steps beyond ObamaCare are, which could come to fruition when Democrats next win back the White House.
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Congressional leaders were poised last month to spend tens of billions of dollars in the omnibus bill to temporarily shore up Obamacare’s failing health insurance system.
That money, however, never would have given Americans the long-term relief they so desperately need.
After this idea was struck from the spending bill, Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., who had worked closely with Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, to shape a bipartisan deal, said that “the only choice we have is to go back to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act.”
We agree. Obamacare is broken and cannot be fixed, and there is a better way forward.
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The Trump administration hopes to move forward with a rule expanding alternatives to ObamaCare plans by this summer, Secretary of Labor Alex Acosta said Monday.
The rule allows for small businesses and self-employed individuals to band together to buy insurance as a group in what are known as association health plans.
“We hope to have that by this summer,” Acosta said Monday during a tax reform event alongside President Trump in Florida.
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Medicaid expansion is back on the ballot.
Organizers in Utah submitted signatures on Monday to put an initiative expanding Medicaid on the state’s ballot in November. They got 165,000 signatures, or about 50,000 more than they needed.
State legislators are actually pushing a limited form of Medicaid expansion, but, as we covered before, the Trump administration seems unlikely to greenlight that proposal. The ballot initiative being submitted today would be a clean version of expansion
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This paper examines the impacts of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) – which substantially increased insurance coverage through regulations, mandates, subsidies, and Medicaid expansions – on behaviors related to future health risks after three years. Using data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System and an identification strategy that leverages variation in pre-ACA uninsured rates and state Medicaid expansion decisions, we show that the ACA increased preventive care utilization along several dimensions, but also increased risky drinking. These results are driven by the private portions of the law, as opposed to the Medicaid expansion. We also conduct subsample analyses by income and age.
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In 2005 and 2009, Elizabeth Warren and her co-authors released two papers claiming that more than 50 percent of all bankruptcy filings in the U.S. were caused by medical debts. I wrote about the problems with these studies when they first came out, and even testified in Congress against reading too much into the findings of these studies because they suffered from several biases. Now an academic study published in the New England Journal of Medicine is skeptical of these results as well. The study tracks a stratified sample of adults between the ages of 25 and 64 who were admitted to the hospital for non-birth-related reasons between 2003 and 2007. It finds that fewer than 4 percent of hospitalizations resulted in bankruptcies, far lower than the 2009 study’s claimed 62 percent.
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According to a new brief from Altarum, health care prices have risen 2.2% since March of last year, the fastest annual growth rate since January 2012. One of the largest drivers of that price growth was hospitals. Altarum found that hospital prices have been growing annually at nearly 4%, the highest level in eight years.
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Murphycare could look a lot like Obamacare.
Lawmakers Thursday sent to Gov. Phil Murphy a bill that will require nearly all New Jerseyans to have health insurance or pay a penalty in a bid to stabilize premiums for consumers in the Obamacare marketplace.
They approved another bill that would set up a reinsurance plan that would partly be paid for by the federal government and cover some of the most expensive health care claims.
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The state’s antitrust lawsuit against Sutter Health is a welcome move to stop Sutter from inflating health care costs across the Northern California market.
The lawsuit alleges that Sutter has illegally used its market power to compel commercial health plans to contract with all or none of its hospitals, extract exorbitant prices and prohibit use of financial incentives to encourage use of lower-cost providers.
The problem is not just Sutter, however, but insurance-contracted provider networks (preferred provider organizations and health maintenance organizations), where insurers negotiate medical service prices, keep those prices hidden and make other private deals that maximize revenue at purchaser and consumer expense.
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