Cartoon – There’s Someone I’d Like You to Meet
Category Archives: Uncategorized
How health care creates wage inequality
You can add health care to the causes of growing wage inequality in America. There’s a largely unknown paradox at work. Companies that try to provide roughly equal health insurance plans for their workers — as many do — end up making wage and salary inequality worse. A new economic study shows how this perverse bargain works.
It’s simple arithmetic, writes Mark Warshawsky of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, author of the study. Paying for expensive health insurance squeezes what’s left for wage and salary raises. Economic inequality increases, because health insurance typically represents a larger share of total compensation for lower-paid than higher-paid workers. Their wages are squeezed the most.
Democratic Senators Ask Justice Department to Block Insurance Megamergers
Seven Democratic senators urged the U.S. Justice Department on Wednesday to block two mergers of major health insurance companies, saying that the proposed deals would mean higher premiums and lower-quality healthcare for consumers.
The department is reviewing Aetna Inc’s $33 billion plan to buy Humana Inc and Anthem Inc’s $48 billion proposal to buy Cigna Corp. If approved, the deals, both of which were announced last July, would reduce the number of national health insurance carriers from five to three.
St. Joseph Health to merge with Providence
St. Joseph Health and Providence Health and Services have received regulatory approval for a merger that will create the nation’s third-largest nonprofit health system, officials said Wednesday.
The California Attorney General’s office signed off on the deal between the two nonprofit Catholic hospital chains. The new entity, Providence St. Joseph Health, will include 16 St. Joseph hospitals, including five in Orange County, and 34 Providence hospitals, including six in Los Angeles County.
A shifting definition of insurers at AHIP Institute
The line between payer and provider continues to blur. Not only are insurers increasingly working closely with providers, but more and more, they are acting like them—and vice versa. Just ask David Bernd, CEO emeritus of the integrated system Sentara Health, who pointed out that the historical “head-to-head combat” between the two entities no longer works in today’s health system. Similarly, as evidenced by the amount of time AHIP CEO Marilyn Tavenner spent lauding Medicaid managed care plans, care management—with a focus on the member as a whole person, not just a patient—is the future.
Cartoon – The Discharge Nurse
‘This is the discharge nurse, she’ll be able to tell you about all the services you aren’t able to get any more when you leave.’
MemorialCare extends ACO to Boeing employees
Fountain Valley, Calif.-based MemorialCare Health System is teaming up with the Boeing Company to offer a customized health plan for the aerospace company’s employees and dependents in Long Beach, South Bay and Orange County. The new option for Boeing employees will include benefits such as reduced paycheck deductions for healthcare coverage, no copayments for in-network primary care visits, complete coverage for generic prescriptions and the ability to choose in-network specialists without a referral, among others. Services will begin Jan. 1, 2017.
Republicans unveil long-sought ACA replacement
Questions to Ask About the House Republican Health Reform Proposal
House Speaker Paul Ryan’s health-care task force is expected to outline its alternative to Obamacare this week. The outline reportedly will not include the level of detail that would allow much external analysis of its impact by health-care experts and the media, though Democrats are likely to attack its concepts, most of which will be familiar proposals that Republicans favor and that Democrats have opposed in the past. The outline is part of Mr. Ryan’s effort to add Republican policy ideas to the election debate, in particular to the presidential campaign, and seems aimed at helping down-ticket Republicans as a part of an agenda that can appeal to their base. Details will be needed to understand whether the plan is more progressive or regressive and how many uninsured people would be covered. Another big question is how Donald Trump will respond.
The Fundamentally Different Goals of the Affordable Care Act and Republican ‘Replacement’ Plans
Rep. Pete Sessions and Sen. Bill Cassidy introduced legislation last month calling for replacing elements of the Affordable Care Act. A House task force established by SpeakerPaul Ryan is expected to follow with more health-care proposals. These Republican health plans are generally referred to as “replacements” for the ACA–in the spirit of “repeal and replace”–as though they would accomplish the same objectives in ways that conservatives prefer. But the proposals are better understood as alternatives with very different goals, trade-offs, and consequences. Whether they are “better” or “worse” depends on your perspective.
To boil down to the most basic differences: The central focus of the Affordable Care Act is expanding coverage and strengthening consumer protections in the health insurance marketplace through government regulation. By contrast, the primary objective of Republican plans is to try to reduce health-care spending by giving people incentives to purchase less costly insurance with more “skin in the game,” with the expectation that they will become more prudent consumers of health services. They also aim to reduce federal spending on Medicare and Medicaid and the federal government’s role in both programs. Elements of the ACA were designed to reduce costs, such as the law’s Medicare payment reforms, and elements of Republican plans such as tax credits aim to expand access to insurance, but the primary aims of the ACA and the Republican plans differ.
