The impact of ObamaCare on doctors and patients, companies inside and outside the health sector, and American workers and taxpayers
Obamacare enrollment has a smoking problem.
A new study from the Yale School of Public Health finds that an anti-smoking provision in the health law is discouraging people from signing up for insurance while simultaneously failing to get them to kick the habit.
Under the Affordable Care Act, individual health insurance plans sold on statewide marketplaces can only set how high their premiums are based on three factors: a customer’s geographic region, age, and smoking status. This is meant to let health insurers adjust their prices for how much medical care an enrollee may wind up using.
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It’s policymaking 101: When a policy delivers benefits to people, support for the policy grows. Political scientists call situations like these “policy feedback loops,” and they are a big part of the story of how Social Security and Medicare became so entrenched in American life. But what happens if hyper-partisanship stops the loop? Consider the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Over the past four years, some 20 million people have gained health coverage and the already-insured have received new protections. But public opinion of the ACA has remained mixed.
The numbers are stark. Monthly tracking polls show that 49 percent hold unfavorable views of the ACA versus just 38 percent holding favorable views.
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Employees contribute far below the maximum amount allowed to an individual-coverage or family-coverage health savings account (HSA), a sign consumers aren’t taking full advantage of the account’s tax benefits, according to a new analysis of consumer records.
Managing health costs, particularly for consumers in or approaching retirement, is considered a growth area for insurance agents and advisors doing comprehensive financial planning. HSAs are primed to play a key role.
More than 20 million Americans have access to health plans with HSAs, according to the trade association America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP). Congress recently passed bipartisan legislation expanding the use and contribution limits for HSAs.
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During the first year of Obamacare’s implementation, the individual insurance market became less healthy while the uninsured and Medicaid populations became healthier, according to a new analysis.
A Health Affairs data analysis released Wednesday underscores the often stated observation that the Affordable Care Act has brought sicker, more expensive enrollees into the individual marketplace while healthier people have tended to resist enrollment.
The analysis uses information in the National Health Interview Survey, conducted by the National Center for Health Statistics. It was conducted by officials from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the Congressional Budget Office, and Social and Scientific Systems.
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House Republicans on Wednesday released their healthcare spending bill for fiscal 2017, boosting funding to fight opioid abuse and the Zika virus while taking aim at ObamaCare and abortion.
Evergreen Health Cooperative must pay $24.2 million to its biggest competitor because of an Affordable Care Act program that aims to level the playing field for insurers taking on riskier customers from state health insurance exchanges.
Evergreen, an innovative insurer established under the new law by former Baltimore Health Commissioner Peter Beilenson, is not alone in having to pay for its healthier clients. Kaiser Permanente of the Mid-Atlantic States owes $14.7 million and Aetna will shell out $11.8 million.
An organization representing state health insurance co-ops criticized the Affordable Care Act’s risk adjustment formula as a failure causing difficulties for the nonprofit insurers created under the law.
The announcement from the National Alliance of State Health Co-Ops came a day after HealthyCT, the Connecticut co-op, was put under an order of suspension, signaling the co-op would start taking steps to shut down. Kelly Crowe, the group’s CEO, said the case was not a “one-off example.”
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A nearly $150 million bill from the federal government has taxpayer-funded Obamacare plans angry, with some experts wondering if more co-ops could shut down in the coming months.
When the Obama administration last week announced payments under the risk adjustment program for the 2015 benefit year, the news wasn’t good for the 10 Obamacare consumer oriented and operated plans, or co-ops, that remain out of the 23 original plans, which owe more than $150 million to the government.
On Tuesday, the payments claimed one victim, as Connecticut’s insurance regulator shut down the HealthyCT co-op after it learned it owed $13.4 million in risk adjustment payments.
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Health insurance premiums have risen rapidly in the three years since the launch of ObamaCare’s exchanges, despite the law’s multibillion-dollar efforts to keep a lid on them. ObamaCare created three mechanisms for bailing out insurers if they lost too much money through the exchanges — the so-called risk corridor, risk adjustment and reinsurance programs. The hope was that the prospect of federal cash to cover potential losses would yield lower premiums.
Cash has indeed been flowing from the federal Treasury — but it hasn’t done much good. According to a new report from the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, the Obama administration has given health insurers 40% more in bailout funds under the reinsurance program than originally planned. Yet premiums still rose by as much as 50% in some parts of the country.
Things will only grow worse. Next year, the reinsurance program will end. Insurers will likely respond by hiking premiums even more or withdrawing from the exchanges. Many have already opted for the latter course because of significant losses.
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Last week, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) released the payment amounts that some insurers owe and some insurers will receive through the Affordable Care Act (ACA) risk adjustment program. As the law’s implementation moves forward, it is increasingly clear that the controversial risk adjustment program presents a fundamental trap, a sort of “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” scenario. To the degree that risk adjustment works, insurers individually lack the incentive to enroll the young and healthy people needed for the ACA’s complicated structure to survive. To the degree that risk adjustment doesn’t work, large arbitrary transfers between insurers occur that produce significant uncertainty in the market.
The risk adjustment program is budget neutral—within each state insurers with healthier enrollees pay the aggregate amount that insurers with less healthy enrollees receive—and is intended to make insurers more-or-less indifferent to the health status of their enrollees. The Obama administration appears to recognize the importance of risk adjustment for the ACA’s future as HHS recently convened a day-long conference and released a 130-page paper on the subject. This conference was partially motivated by the strong complaints, particularly by newer and smaller insurers, that the program unfairly benefits large, established insurers.
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