The growth in health care spending has slowed down and President Obama wants America to know his health care law gets the credit. Or maybe the blame, because one reason for that slowdown is that people are spending more out of their own pockets. Health care actuaries say that when people have to spend more out of pocket for health care, they tend to spend less elsewhere. And when a third party—employers, health insurers or the government—insulates consumers from the cost of care they tend to spend more. – See more at: http://www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/index.php?Article_ID=25652#sthash.KaaCV94L.3b1iR1LZ.dpuf
One of the key questions surrounding Obamacare is just how many people have been newly insured under the law. The answer is clouded by the fact that the White House and others have changed some rules of math for making these assessments.
For example, several years ago, the Obama administration fiddled with the Census Bureau’s definition of what it means to be “uninsured.” The new parameters, which were looser than the old factors, make it hard to construct comparisons between today’s figures for the total number of uninsured and the historical trends.
The Obama team also abruptly started to exclude uninsured illegal immigrants from the national tally on total number of uninsured Americans. Before Obamacare, these individuals were counted in that reporting, inflating the numbers. After Obamacare, these individuals didn’t get insurance, but suddenly didn’t get counted any more.
Now, a new analysis from the highly regarded managed care analyst at Goldman Sachs, Matthew Borsch, and his team, cast uncertainty on some of the recent data releases from the White House, and its network of academicians. In particular, the Goldman breakdown conflicts in some key ways with a recent analysis from RAND that was published in the journal Health Affairs and widely cited by the media.
A report scheduled for release Monday by a conservative-leaning think tank accuses state officials of misleading the federal government and the public about the Massachusetts Health Connector’s readiness to launch its new website in October 2013.
The report from the Pioneer Institute draws on public audit reports and interviews with anonymous people described as “whistle-blowers” to detail what they characterize as a bungled effort by the University of Massachusetts Medical School, software developer CGI, and the Connector to upgrade the Connector’s software in 2012 and 2013.
The Connector — designed to link people with health insurance when they don’t have another source — eventually ended its relationships with UMass and CGI.
Three-quarters of emergency physicians say they’ve seen ER patient visits surge since Obamacare took effect — just the opposite of what many Americans expected would happen.
A poll released today by the American College of Emergency Physicians shows that 28% of 2,099 doctors surveyed nationally saw large increases in volume, while 47% saw slight increases. By contrast, fewer than half of doctors reported any increases last year in the early days of the Affordable Care Act.
Such hikes run counter to one of the goals of the health care overhaul, which is to reduce pressure on emergency rooms by getting more people insured through Medicaid or subsidized private coverage and providing better access to primary care.
A major reason that hasn’t happened is there simply aren’t enough primary care physicians to handle all the newly insured patients, says ACEP President Mike Gerardi, an emergency physician in New Jersey.
Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) has a simple question: How and why did Congress qualify as a “small business” eligible for special taxpayer subsidies under the Affordable Care Act (ACA)? For anyone in a real small business — private employers who get no such subsidies — the very idea is absurd. But getting a straight answer is as difficult as getting Lois Lerner’s IRS emails.
In search of answers, Vitter proposed subpoenaing documents from the District of Columbia Health Benefits Exchange Authority. But his colleagues on the Small Business and Entrepreneurship Committee recently voted (14 to five) to block the effort. They’ve tried to justify their lack of curiosity by calling the proposed subpoena an unnecessary “distraction” or an invitation to a “protracted” legal fight. But these are rather obviously lame excuses.
With Milwaukee-based Assurant Health continuing to bleed red ink, its parent company announced in a Tuesday news release it will either sell the health insurer or exit the health insurance business.
Assurant Health’s product lines include Time Insurance and John Alden. The company has more than 1,000 employees at its downtown Milwaukee offices, 501 W. Michigan St.
The impact on those employees will depend on whether the company is sold and the business strategy of a buyer.
“It’s premature for us to comment on possible outcomes,” said Assurant Inc. spokeswoman Vera Carley of impact on employees.
Despite being designed to help the poor, certain aspects of Obamacare are holding millions of individuals back who fall into what is being called the “coverage gap.”
Reverend Vann R. Ellison, the president of the Florida based St. Matthew’s House, is trying to bring attention to the issue which he says affects people that fall between the $10,000 and $12,000 a year income range. St. Matthew’s House, which takes care of roughly 1,500 people, provides food and shelter to those individuals trying to work their way out of poverty.
“We generally deal with lower income people trying to get their lives together,” Ellison told The Daily Caller News Foundation. “These are people that can’t afford their own apartments.”
Those in that income range make too much to qualify for assistance under Obamacare but often times make too little to actually afford coverage or the fee that comes with not being covered. It’s an issue that impacts many of the lower income people Ellison is trying to help.
Although the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was enacted 5 years ago, 2014 was the first year of implementation for most of the health law’s major provisions. In fact, it turned out to be a glitch machine. Defying the expectations of even the law’s most ardent critics, Obamacare’s rollout of the federal online health exchange was a disaster, combined with the cancellation of millions of private health insurance policies (if you “liked” your plan, too bad), a delay in reporting requirements of the employer mandate, and new administrative exemptions from the individual mandate penalty.
Nonetheless, the Obama administration’s allies insist that the law is “working” and that it will even become popular with the majority of Americans with the passage of time. The law’s congressional supporters, they hope, will reap political benefits rather than political retribution.
King vs. Burwell is on the horizon. If the plaintiffs are successful, so goes the theory, subsidies end in 37 exchanges operated by the Department of Health and Human Services and serviced by HealthCare.gov. Coverage gets more expensive, and people won’t be able to afford their policies.
But, this outcome was foretold all the way back in the Senate mark-up of the proposed ACA legislation. Purposely requiring subsidies in state-run exchanges remains the incentive for states to set them up. The administration did not expect so many states elected not to set up their own exchanges, and it is now a big problem. As was noted in 2009 by critics of the bill, if states don’t hand out subsidies, people won’t be able to afford to buy coverage.
In the health savings account industry, the problem is compounded. The ACA law also created a perpetual rule change engine. For example, every year HHS issues what’s called the Letter to Issuers letter to Federal-facilitated Marketplaces (FFMs), in which it discusses all of the fixes that need to be made to exchange operations. This year, HHS has proclaimed that we would all be better off if out-of-pocket maximums (OOPM) for “other than self-only coverage” were restricted to the OOPM for individuals or $6,850 for 2016.
My son Benjamin has a serious growth hormone deficiency. He’ll be 13 years old in May but could easily pass for a boy of 8 or 9. In fact, many 8- and 9-year-olds are taller than him. He’s a full head shorter than all of his pals in seventh grade.
Although his mother and I don’t have medical degrees, we medical degrees, we had Benjamin’s diagnosis pegged when he was 3 years old and still wearing clothing for an 18-month-old.
Several trips to his pediatrician along with a couple simple tests to assess Benjamin’s bone age confirmed with data what we could see with our own eyes. Our boy wasn’t just in the bottom percentile in average height for kids his age – he was in the sub-basement