Tag Archives: Health Policy

Traditional Medicare Doesn’t Cover Dental Care. That Can Be a Big Problem.

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Traditional Medicare Doesn’t Cover Dental Care. That Can Be a Big Problem.

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Many people view Medicare as the gold standard of United States health coverage, and any attempt to cut it incurs the wrath of older Americans, a politically powerful group.

But there are substantial coverage gaps in traditional Medicare. One of them is care for your teeth.

Almost one in five adults of Medicare eligibility age (65 years old and older) have untreated cavities. The same proportion have lost all their teeth. Half of Medicare beneficiaries have some periodontal disease, or infection of structures around teeth, including the gums.

Bacteria from such infections can circulate elsewhere in the body, contributing to other health problems such as heart disease and strokes.

And yet traditional Medicare does not cover routine dental care, like checkups, cleanings, fillings, dentures and tooth extraction.

After I wrote a recent article about the lack of coverage for dental care in many state Medicaid programs, I received a lot of feedback from readers saying Medicare was no better.

I have not had dental coverage since I retired 25 years ago. Any problems and I have to go to a foreign country to get treatment that I can afford. It is incredible that there is no coverage available in America for one of the most important aspects of health and wellness care for seniors. — Tom, La Jolla

Several of my elderly relatives have just let teeth fall out without being cared for or replaced because of expense. This is no way to care for our senior citizens. — Bronxbee, Bronx

Paying for dental care out of pocket is hard for many Medicare beneficiaries. Half have annual incomes below $23,000 per year. Those who have the means, but are looking for a deal, might travel abroad for cheaper dental care. Tens of thousands of Americans go to Mexico every year for dental work at lower prices. Many others travel the globe for care.

Although low-income Medicare beneficiaries can also qualify for Medicaid, that’s of little help for those living in states with gaps in Medicaid dental coverage.

According to a study published in Health Affairs, in a given year, three-quarters of low-income Medicare beneficiaries do not receive any dental care at all. Among higher-income beneficiaries, the figure is about one-quarter.

“The separation of coverage for dental care from the rest of our health care has had dramatic effects on both,” said Amber Willink, the lead author of the study and a researcher at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “As a consequence of avoidable dental problems, the Medicare program bears the cost of expensive emergency department visits and avoidable hospitalizations. It’s lose-lose.”

Traditional Medicare will cover dental procedures that are integral to other covered services. So if your Medicare-covered hospital procedure involved dental structures in some way, important related dental care would be covered. But paying for any other care is up to the patient.

Lack of dental coverage by Medicare is among the top concerns of beneficiaries. The program also lacks coverage for hearing, vision or long-term care services. However, many Medicare Advantage plans — private alternatives to the traditional program — cover these services.

For example, 58 percent of Medicare Advantage enrollees have coverage for dental exams. In receiving these benefits through private plans, enrollees are also subject to plans’ efforts to limit use by, for example, requiring prior authorization or offering narrow networks of providers. These restrictions can be problematic for some beneficiaries, and about two-thirds of Medicare beneficiaries opt for the traditional program, not a private plan.

Adding a dental benefit to Medicare is popular. A Families USA survey of likely voters found that the vast majority (86 percent) of likely voters support doing so. The survey also found that when people do not see a dentist, the top reason is cost.

Ms. Willink’s study estimated that a Medicare dental benefit that covered three-quarters of the cost of care would increase Medicare premiums by $7 per month, or about 5 percent. The rest would need to be financed by taxes.

The cost of such a benefit might be offset — or partly offset — by reductions in other health care spending, reflecting the fact that poor oral health contributes to other health problems.

Making a case for this in the political arena would not be easy, though. The initial cost would be an inviting target for politicians who express concern about fiscal prudence, regardless of any potential long-term gain. But expanding Medicare has been done before.

In 2006, a prescription drug benefit was added to the program. The law for that program was enacted in 2003, and in that same year, the surgeon general released a report calling for dental care to be treated and covered like other health care. Whether by Medicaid or Medicare, that wish is still unfulfilled.

 

How Did State-Run Health Insurance Marketplaces Fare in 2017?

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http://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/issue-briefs/2018/mar/how-did-state-run-marketplaces-fare-in-2017?

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Abstract

  • Issue: Sixteen states and the District of Columbia manage their own health insurance marketplaces under the Affordable Care Act. These states, which were broadly supportive of health reform, chose to run their marketplaces to exert greater control over their insurance markets and tailor the portals to suit local needs. Though federal policy changes and political uncertainty around the ACA in 2017 have posed challenges across the country, states that operate their own marketplaces had greater flexibility than others to respond.
  • Goal: To understand how states on the forefront of health reform perceived and responded to federal policy changes and political uncertainty in 2017.
  • Methods: Structured interviews with the leadership staff of 15 of the 17 state-run marketplaces.
  • Findings and Conclusions: Respondents unanimously suggested that federal administrative actions and repeal efforts have created confusion and uncertainty that have negatively affected their markets. The state-run marketplaces used their broader authority to reduce consumer confusion and promote stable insurer participation. However, their capacity to deal with federal uncertainty has limits and respondents stated that long-term stability requires a reliable federal partner.

Background

The Affordable Care Act created health insurance marketplaces, also known as exchanges, in each state to help people who don’t have access to insurance through an employer or public program. The marketplaces act as a gateway to coverage for residents, providing a platform through which they can compare and purchase plans. Sixteen states and the District of Columbia are responsible for managing their own marketplaces; 34 states rely on the federal government to operate their exchange.

States that decided to manage their marketplaces wanted to retain control over their insurance markets and have the authority to tailor the portal to meet local needs.2 Compared with states using the federally run marketplace, nearly all these states have expanded their Medicaid programs and have been much more likely to adopt the ACA’s consumer protections into state law — potentially making it easier to enforce these reforms.3

Since President Trump’s election, the ACA and marketplaces have faced an uncertain future. The president has been openly hostile to the ACA and sought its repeal.4 At the same time, the administration has made regulatory and other implementation changes and reduced the funding that supports the marketplaces. These decisions have all affected how the law operates in practice and have had serious repercussions across the country.5 However, the impact has not been uniform. It has varied, in part, based on the choices state policymakers have made in implementing the ACA — including whether to run their own exchange.

We sought to understand how states that have been more actively engaged in reform have perceived federal policy changes and political uncertainty in 2017, and to explore whether these states were better able to promote stability within their markets. To do so, we interviewed the leadership staff of 15 of the 17 state-run marketplaces in September and October 2017.6 This brief explores key themes that emerged from those interviews. It identifies the major challenges facing the marketplaces as they went into the fifth open enrollment period, how states responded to those challenges, and the limits on states’ capacities to act.

Key Findings

Federal Actions Made It Harder for States to Manage Their Own Marketplaces

Marketplace respondents were unanimous in suggesting that actions taken by the Trump administration and ongoing efforts to repeal the ACA have created confusion and uncertainty that have negatively affected their markets. While these marketplaces had experienced ups and downs during their first three years of operation, many respondents were relatively optimistic in the fall of 2016 about future enrollment growth and stability in terms of plan participation and premiums — a view supported by independent analyses.7 But federal developments in 2017 made the challenges of the previous year “pale in comparison,” and respondents described a far more uncertain future.

Officials highlighted four federal-level developments during 2017 that jeopardized stability. First, respondents said that the administration’s repeated threats to end federal payments supporting the ACA’s cost-sharing reduction (CSR) plans caused protracted confusion and disruption and placed states in a “real jam.” These threats were eventually carried out, after months of uncertainty, in October 2017. But as deadlines for marketplace participation and rate setting for the upcoming year (2018) came and went with no clarity on whether the administration would continue to reimburse insurers for the cost of the CSR subsidies, marketplaces struggled to get insurers to commit to participate and to develop responses to the significantly higher premiums the insurers sought to offset the lost payments.8

Second, most respondents noted that actions taken by the administration to undermine the ACA’s individual mandate had the effect of undermining their marketplaces, as well. The requirement to maintain coverage, ultimately repealed on a prospective basis in December, was the law of the land throughout 2017 (and remains so in 2018). However, officials noted that an executive order, signed by the president on Inauguration Day, cast doubt on the enforcement of the mandate and caused insurers to be more cautious when setting rates.9 Many priced higher than they would have otherwise, fearing that a weakened mandate would lead to a sicker and more expensive risk pool.10 The president’s actions and words were also perceived to have caused widespread confusion among consumers about whether the requirement to maintain coverage was still the law.

In a related vein, officials repeatedly expressed frustration at “federal noise”: ongoing but thus far inconclusive discussions about repealing and replacing the ACA, and related rhetoric by administration officials and congressional allies asserting that the health law was “dead” or “collapsing.” Respondents said it was a challenge to ensure residents had accurate information. They reported many instances of consumer confusion about the marketplaces, the mandate, coverage options, and the status of the health law, in general.

Fourth, a majority of respondents predicted that the administration’s decision to reduce advertising spending for the federal marketplace by 90 percent would have negative side effects for the state-run exchanges. Officials in both big and small states explained that because the federal marketing campaign was national in scope and used television advertising — a medium too expensive for several state marketplaces — it was effective in reaching their residents and had complemented state messaging efforts in prior years. Several respondents also lamented the perceived political ramifications of the funding cut, suggesting that the administration’s action would cause enrollment through the federal exchange to diminish, putting the entire program at greater risk of repeal.

 

Hospitals acquired 5,000 physician practices in a single year

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http://www.healthcarefinancenews.com/news/hospitals-acquired-5000-physician-practices-single-year?mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiTXpFeU1qUTJPR00yWm1FeiIsInQiOiJiZTRrblwvWEVKWVZmVWFoanhPRFRpcFFwa3JHQUI4eGpRdCs4b0NOOVJFc1I5M2kxNlIwYnFmVHVFb3Viem5BaHg4RE91amVpT2xBMUxRWEdMSFBJZHZGTVdCQ2xJMHlsNm1yUU5rV0lpT3o0aFhNTE9uaVFKMm53RU42SWJMc2wifQ%3D%3D

Since hospital-employed doctors tend to perform services in an outpatient setting, the trend increases costs for Medicare and patients.

Hospitals have been scooping up physician practices at a record clip. Research conducted by Avalere for the nonprofit Physician Advocacy Institute shows hospitals nabbed 5,000 physician practices and employed 14,000 physicians between July 2015 and July 2016, an 11 percent uptick.

Since 2012, that’s a 100 percent increase in hospital-owned physician practices, indicating those medical groups may be struggling to maintain independence in a healthcare landscape that is increasingly geared toward larger, integrated systems.

That scenario increases costs for both Medicare and patients themselves, since hospital-employed physicians tend to perform services in a hospital outpatient setting. The researchers revealed higher costs for services such as colonoscopy and cardiac imaging.

Increased physician employment by hospitals, in fact, caused Medicare costs for four healthcare services to rise $3.1 billion between 2012 and 2015, with beneficiaries facing $411 million more in financial responsibility for these services than they would have if they were performed in independent physicians’ offices, the research showed.

From mid-2012 to mid-2016, the percentage of hospital-employed physicians increased by more than 63 percent, with increases in nearly every six-month time period measured over these four years. All regions of the country saw an increase in hospital-owned practices at every measured time period, with a range of total increase from 83 percent to 205 percent.

This trend, the authors said, shows government- and insurer-mandated payment policies favor larger health systems, creating a competitive disadvantage for independent physicians, many of whom are already struggling financially due to administrative and regulatory burdens. Independent physicians often find it prohibitively difficult to cut costs while maintaining clinical quality, and failure to maintain quality can result in federal reimbursement penalties.

The acquisition trend held true in every region of the country, but was most prevalent in the Midwest; it was least prevalent in the South.

PAI is examining these trends as part of an ongoing effort to better understand how physician employment and health care consolidation affects the practice of medicine and impacts patients.

Republicans release new plan to lower health premiums, stabilize Obamacare markets

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https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2018/03/19/republicans-release-new-plan-lower-health-premiums-stabilize-obamacare-markets/439216002/

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 Sen. Lamar Alexander and other congressional Republicans are pressing forward with their latest plan to stabilize Obamacare health insurance markets and help provide coverage for patients with high medical costs.

But while previous versions have had bipartisan support, Democrats are refusing to back the latest bill.

Alexander and three key Republicans filed legislation Monday that they said could provide coverage for an additional 3.2 million individuals and lower premiums by as much as 40 percent for people who don’t get their health insurance through the government or their employer.

Beginning in 2019, the bill would reinstate for three years the government subsidies paid to insurers that provide health-care coverage to low-income clients. It also would provide $30 billion in funding – $10 billion a year over three years – to help states set up high-risk insurance pools to provide coverage for people with high medical costs.

The proposal also would revise the Obamacare waiver process so that states will have more flexibility to design and regulate insurance plans. In addition, it would require the Department of Health and Human Services to issue regulations allowing insurers to sell plans across state lines.

“Our recommendations are based upon Senate and House proposals developed in several bipartisan hearings and roundtable discussions,” the proposal’s Republican sponsors said in a statement.

The bill is sponsored in the Senate by Alexander, who chairs the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, and Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine. The sponsors in the House are Rep. Greg Walden, R-Ore., who chairs the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and Rep. Ryan Costello, R-Penn.

The lawmakers are hoping to include the bill in a massive spending package that Congress is expected to take up by the end of the week. President Donald Trump told Alexander and Collins in a conference call over the weekend that he wants money to lower health insurance premiums included in the spending package.

The bill marks the latest attempt by lawmakers to offer short-term fixes that could bring some stability to the volatile health insurance markets created under the Affordable Care Act and help offset the higher insurance premiums expected to result from the repeal of the Obamacare requirement that most Americans buy insurance.

Alexander and the Senate health committee’s top Democrat, Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, struck a deal last fall to extend the cost-sharing subsidies for two years. Trump has halted the payments, established under the Affordable Care Act, which are worth around $7 billion each year.

But Murray and other Democrats are refusing to sign onto the latest proposal because it includes language that they say would expand the restrictions on federal funding of abortions.

“Senator Murray is disappointed that Republicans are rallying behind a new partisan bill that includes a last-minute, harmful restriction on abortion coverage for private insurance companies instead of working with Democrats to wrap up what have been bipartisan efforts to reduce health care costs,” said Murray’s spokeswoman, Helen Hare.

Murray “hopes the unexpected release of this partisan legislation isn’t a signal from Republicans that they have once again ended ongoing negotiations aimed at lowering families’ health care costs in favor of partisan politics, and that they come back to the table to finally get this done,” Hare said.

Republicans, meanwhile, pointed to an analysis by health care experts at the management consulting firm Oliver Wyman that compared the new proposal to what people in the individual market will pay if Congress fails to act.

The analysis showed that the package would reduce premiums by up to 40 percent in the individual market for farmers, small business owners and others who don’t buy their insurance from the government or their employer.

A self-employed plumber making $60,000, for example, may be paying $20,000 for health insurance now, but over time that insurance bill could be cut up to $8,000, the lawmakers said.

Preliminary projections from the Congressional Budget Office indicated that the plan could be adopted without adding to the federal debt.

 

Back to the Health Policy Drawing Board

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The Affordable Care Act needs help. After scores of failed repeal attempts, Congress enacted legislation late last year that eliminated one of the law’s central features, the mandate requiring people to buy insurance.

Obamacare, as the Affordable Care Act is widely known, isn’t in imminent danger of collapse, but the mandate’s repeal poses a serious long-term threat.

To understand that threat and how it might be parried, it’s helpful to consider why the United States has relied so heavily on employer-provided insurance — and why it has not yet adopted a form of the universal coverage seen in most other countries.

First, some basics on private insurance: It works well only when many people, each with a low risk of loss, buy in. Most homeowners buy fire insurance, for example, and only a small fraction file claims annually. A modest premium can therefore cover large losses sustained by a few.

But because of what economists call the adverse-selection problem, this model can easily break down for private health insurance. People typically know more about their own health risks than insurers do, making those most at risk more likely to purchase insurance.

This drives premiums up, making insurance still less attractive to the healthiest people. That, in turn, causes many to drop out, producing the fabled “death spiral” in which only the least healthy people remain insured. But at that point, private health insurance may no longer be viable, because annual treatment costs for serious illnesses often exceed several hundred thousand dollars.

Most nations have solved this problem by adopting universal coverage financed by taxes. The United States probably would have followed this approach except for a historical anomaly during World War II. Fearing runaway inflation in tight labor markets, the American government imposed a cap on wages.

But the cap didn’t apply to fringe benefits, which employers quickly exploited as a recruiting tool. Employer health plans proved particularly attractive, since their cost was a deductible expense and they were not taxed. Before the war started, only 9 percent of workers had employer-provided insurance, but 63 percent had it by 1953.

To be eligible for favorable tax treatment, companies were required to make their plans available to all employees, which mitigated the adverse-selection problem. People would lose insurance if they lost their jobs, which inhibited labor mobility, but since employment relationships were relatively durable in the postwar years, this arrangement worked well enough.

But after peaking at almost 70 percent in the 1990s, employer coverage began declining in the face of stagnating wages and rising insurance costs. By 2010, only 56 percent of the nonelderly American population still had workplace health plans.

Even so, because more than 100 million Americans still had such plans and were reasonably satisfied with them, the Obama administration opted to build health reform atop the existing system. In addition to allowing people to keep their existing employer coverage, Obamacare expanded eligibility for Medicaid and established exchanges in which people without employer plans could buy insurance.

At the outset, Obamacare had three central features:

• Insurers could not charge higher prices to people with pre-existing conditions.

• Those without coverage had to pay a penalty to the government (the “mandate”).

• Low-income people would be eligible for subsidies.

The first two provisions were necessary to prevent the death spiral, and government couldn’t mandate insurance purchases without adding subsidies for the poor.

Despite a bumpy rollout and some frustrations over shrinking choices and rising prices at health care exchanges, Obamacare was working remarkably well by most important metrics. Program costs were much lower than expected, and the uninsured rate among nonelderly Americans fell sharply — from 18.2 percent in 2010 to only 10.3 percent in 2018.

This progress is now imperiled.

The mandate — by far the program’s least popular provision — was repealed as part of tax legislation passed in December 2017. And because economists predict that its absence will slowly rekindle the insurance death spiral, we’re forced back to the policy drawing board.

The most common response has been to call for a variant of the single-payer systems employed by most other countries, which promise dramatic reductions in health costs.

The United States spends far more on health care than any other nation, yet gets worse outcomes on most measures. In part this is because administrative and marketing expenses are much lower under single-payer plans. But by far the most important source of savings is that governments are able to negotiate much more favorable terms with service providers. Virtually every procedure, test, and drug costs substantially more here than elsewhere.

An American hospital stay, for example, costs more than twelve times as much as one in the Netherlands. The single-payer approach also sidesteps the thorny mandate objection by covering everyone out of tax revenue.

A June 2017 poll showed that 60 percent of Americans said the government should provide universal coverage, and support for single-payer insurance rose more than one-third since 2014.

Yet a move to a single-payer system faces the same hurdle that shaped Obamacare: Millions of Americans would resist any attempt to take their employer-provided plans away. And although single-payer health care would be far less costly overall, it would be paid for by taxes — the most visible form of sacrifice — rather than by the implicit levies that underwrite employer coverage.

From a purely economic standpoint, the increased tax burden is irrelevant. It’s a truism that making the economic pie larger necessarily makes it possible for everyone to get a larger slice than before. And because the gains from single-payer insurance would be so large, there must be ways to make everyone come out ahead, even in the short run.

The Yale political scientist Jacob Hacker, for example, has proposed the introduction of Medicare Part E (Medicare for Everyone), which would allow anyone to buy into Medicare, regardless of age. The program’s budget would be supported in part by levies on employers that don’t offer insurance.

The cost savings inherent in this form of single-payer coverage would lead more and more firms to abandon their current plans voluntarily. Gradually, the age for standard Medicare eligibility also would fall until the entire population was covered by it. The Center for American Progress has now introduced a similar proposal.

It’s critical to realize that there are attractive paths forward. In no other wealthy country do we see people organize bake sales to help pay for a neighbor’s cancer care. We can avoid this national embarrassment without requiring painful sacrifices from anyone.

 

 

Obamacare insurers just had their best year ever — despite Trump

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https://www.politico.com/story/2018/03/17/obamacare-insurers-2017-profit-analysis-422559

Flyers promoting Blue Cross Blue Shield are pictured. | AP Photo

A new POLITICO analysis finds many health plans turned a profit for the first time as GOP fumbled repeal.

Obamacare is no longer busting the bank for insurers.

After three years of financial bloodletting under the law — and despite constant repeal threats and efforts by the Trump administration to dismantle it — many of the remaining insurers made money on individual health plans for the first time last year, according to a POLITICO analysis of financial filings for 29 regional Blue Cross Blue Shield plans, often the dominant player in their markets.

The biggest reason for the improvement is simple: big premium spikes. The Blue plans increased premiums by more than 25 percent on average in 2017, meaning many insurers charged enough to cover their customers’ medical costs for the first time since the Affordable Care Act marketplaces launched in 2014 with robust coverage requirements.

“2017 was the first year we got our head above water in the individual market since the ACA passed,” said Steven Udvarhelyi, CEO of Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Louisiana.

However, one good year won’t ease the trepidation many insurers feel as they start planning for 2019. After knocking out the law’s individual mandate and a subsidy program worth billions of dollars to insurers late last year, the Trump administration is soon expected to finalize rules making it easier to buy cheaper plans exempt from some Obamacare rules.

“I don’t think we’ve turned the corner,” said Kurt Kossen, president of retail markets at Health Care Service Corporation, which operates Blue plans in five states. The insurer lost $2.5 billion on its individual market business during Obamacare’s first three years, he noted. “One year of being able to make a profit out of four certainly is not a stable market,” he said.

“They understand the risks of the market better now than they did at the start of the ACA exchanges,” said Deep Banerjee, an analyst with Standard & Poor’s who has written extensively about the marketplaces.

The gains were particularly notable among some of the biggest insurers. Health Care Service Corporation spent 77.7 percent of premiums on medical claims, an improvement of 18.5 percentage points over the prior year. Similarly, Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina saw its margin improve by just over 10 percentage points.

But not all insurers have figured out how to make money in the troubled markets, which have failed to attract enough young and healthy customers to function effectively in many states. Of the 29 insurers analyzed, eight plans spent more than 90 percent of premium revenues on medical costs last year, meaning they almost certainly lost money in the marketplaces.

The POLITICO analysis provides a snapshot of financial performance in the marketplaces in 2017, not a definitive portrait. Combined, the 29 Blue plans had 4.5 million individual market customers at the end of last year, accounting for about one-fifth of the total market for people who buy their own coverage.

The healthier balance sheets are a welcome development for insurers after three years of major Obamacare losses, estimated at more than $15 billion by McKinsey. That led many national insurers, including UnitedHealth Group and Aetna, to flee the law’s marketplaces, in some cases leaving Blue Cross Blue Shield plans as the only option for customers.

But their improved financial fortunes could also complicate efforts to convince Republican lawmakers to support an Obamacare stabilization package as part of the massive spending bill Congress is trying pass by March 23. Lawmakers are looking to add new funds to help insurers with especially sick customers and restore a subsidy program known as cost-sharing reductions that helps insurers pay medical bills for their low-income customers.

However, a dispute over abortion language is holding up the Obamacare package in Congress. And many conservatives are wary of providing more funding to prop up the marketplaces, deriding it as a bailout for insurance companies.

“The rates can stay low without these payments,” said Rep. Larry Bucshon (R-Ind.), a member of the Energy and Commerce Committee, regarding the cost-sharing reductions that President Donald Trump cut last fall.

Insurers argue that looking at financial performance over a single year is misleading, and they say they’ve been repeatedly blindsided by changes to the law. For instance, because of budgetary restraints Republicans demanded, insurers haven’t received an expected $12 billion from a program meant to help them cover particularly expensive customers. Dozens of insurers are now suing the federal government to recover payments.

“If you don’t want to stabilize the current market, what’s your solution?” Udvarhelyi said. “The fact that we’ve hung in there losing hundreds of millions of dollars is a testament to the fact that we do care, but we need responsible action on the part of policymakers right now.”

Patrick Conway, CEO of Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina, points out his company would have kept 2018 premiums flat if Trump hadn’t eliminated the cost-sharing subsidy. Instead, the insurer jacked up rates by an average of 13 percent to make up for the lost funding.

“We’re dedicated to having the lowest possible premiums for our customers, and market stabilization would help us have the lowest possible premiums,” Conway said. “I’ve been traveling around the state and people are really worried about the cost.”

As insurers start to crunch the numbers on 2019 premiums, they will have to account for uncertainty over congressional funding and recent steps taken by the Trump administration weakening Obamacare. The elimination of the requirement to purchase insurance, which takes effect in 2019, and the administration’s efforts to make it easier to sell cheaper, skinnier plans that don’t meet Obamacare’s coverage requirements, are likely to further destabilize the markets.

The insurers’ biggest concern is fewer healthy individuals will buy Obamacare plans, either going without coverage, since they’ll no longer face a fine next year, or buying a new cheaper plan that covers far less.

“These things will chip away at the market,” S&P’s Banerjee said. “It’s not going to get meaningfully worse, but it doesn’t get any better.”

Insurers are warning that they’ll again have to jack up rates in 2019 if Congress doesn’t take action to stabilize the markets. A study from California’s marketplace suggests premium spikes around the country are likely to range from 16 to 30 percent next year. That means many Obamacare customers could be facing sticker shock just weeks before heading to the polls.

Polling has consistently shown that Republicans will shoulder most of the blame for future problems in Obamacare, since they’re fully in charge of the federal government. That could spur them to begrudgingly take action to tamp down premium increases, despite their disdain for the health care law.

“I think the people in charge, whether it’s fair or not, will probably [get the blame],” said Rep. Brett Guthrie (R-Ky.), vice chair of the House Energy and Commerce health subcommittee. “Everybody’s prices are going up. We’re going to have to figure out some way to improve it.”

 

 

With Some Republican Support, Virginia Edges Closer To Medicaid Expansion

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https://khn.org/news/with-some-republican-support-virginia-edges-closer-to-medicaid-expansion/

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Virginia is among 18 states that have not expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. But this year, the state legislature is closer to enacting expansion than it has been in the past, and the issue will be the sticking point as the legislature goes into a special session next month to hash out its budget.

Republican Del. Barry Knight from the Virginia Beach area calls it “the 800-pound gorilla in the room.” He’s one of more than a dozen Republicans who voted to include Medicaid expansion in the House budget — along with a work requirement — this year.

It’s a big shift in the House position on the issue and comes after 15 seats flipped to Democrats in the so-called blue wave of last November’s election, which also saw the election of Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam.

“On the big-picture issues, I think it was a reawakening and a call to look at things from a different perspective,” said Republican Del. Chris Peace, from the Richmond area, who also voted in favor of expansion.

A December poll showed that over 80 percent of likely Virginia voters support an expansion.

“I think the House heard that message, loud and clear. I think the Senate still needs to listen a little bit,” Northam said.

The state Senate still has a strong bulwark against expansion, led by Senate Majority Leader Tommy Norment, who represents the Tidewater area in southeastern Virginia. Norment has come out against the House Republicans who want to expand. He reminds them that, despite a slim margin, Republicans are still in charge and could stop Medicaid expansion.

“I do think that the House of Delegates is waiting for that moment of lucidity and epiphany to realize that their majority is 51 to 49,” Norment said.

But opposition to President Donald Trump has energized Democratic voters, said Bob Holsworth, a former political science professor at Virginia Commonwealth University. He said he thinks expansion has a greater chance this year.

It could pass in the Senate, he said, because of a potential wildcard: Republican Sen. Emmett Hanger, from mostly rural central Virginia. Hanger has expressed support for some form of Medicaid expansion, and has a track record of voting independently, said Holsworth.

“What Hanger has said that’s very interesting … is that if he decides to support some version of Medicaid expansion, he says, ‘There are a number of other Republicans who are going to go over with me,’” said Holsworth.

However, Hanger said he isn’t happy about a tax on hospitals that has been incorporated into the House’s budget to help pay for the state’s share of expansion costs. The tax accounts for about three-quarters of the over $400 million Medicaid-related gulf between House and Senate budgets.

If legislators don’t come up with a budget that includes Medicaid expansion, Northam has a Plan B. He said he’ll introduce an amendment to add it back into the budget. In the amendment process, the lieutenant governor, Democrat Justin Fairfax, gets a vote if the Senate ties. Fairfax said he’d be happy to vote to expand coverage to up to 400,000 low-income Virginians.

“There are so many people that we can help, and we have the means to do it if we expand Medicaid. We just have to have the political will to do it,” Fairfax said.

Medicaid expansion in Virginia would especially benefit low-income adults without children.

“An adult who does not have children can have zero income — can be totally impoverished — and they cannot get Medicaid,” said Jill Hanken with the Virginia Poverty Law Center.

And a family of three with a total income of about $10,000 doesn’t qualify for Medicaid, she said.

“It’s hard to explain to them that they don’t have a choice, they’re not eligible for Medicaid,” she said, and they’re not eligible for subsidies for insurance on the exchange, so health insurance is out of reach. “And the reason is because Virginia hasn’t expanded Medicaid,” she said.

The special session begins April 11. The state needs a budget agreement by June 30 to prevent a government shutdown.

Paying Hospitals To Keep People Out Of Hospitals? It Works In Maryland.

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https://khn.org/news/paying-hospitals-to-keep-people-out-of-hospitals-it-works-in-maryland/

Saturdays at Mercy Medical Center used to be perversely lucrative. The dialysis clinic across the street was closed on weekends.

That meant the downtown Baltimore hospital would see patients with failing kidneys who should have gone to the dialysis center. So Mercy admitted them, collecting as much as $30,000 for treatment that typically costs hundreds of dollars.

“That’s how the system worked,” said Mercy CEO Thomas Mullen. Instead of finding less expensive alternatives, he said, “our financial people were saying, ‘We need to admit them.’”

Maryland’s ambitious hospital-payment overhaul, put in place in 2014, has changed such crass calculations, which are still business as usual for most of American health care. A modification of a long-standing state regulation that would be hard to replicate elsewhere, the system is nevertheless attracting national attention, analysts say.

As soon as Mercy started being penalized rather than rewarded for such avoidable admissions, it persuaded the dialysis facility to open on weekends, saving government insurance programs and other payers close to $1 million annually.

In the four years since Maryland implemented a statewide system of pushing hospitals to lower admissions, such savings are adding up to hundreds of millions of dollars for the taxpayers, employers and others who ultimately pay the bills, a new report shows.

Maryland essentially pays hospitals to keep people out of the hospital. Analysts often describe the change as the most far-reaching attempt in the nation to control the medical costs driving up insurance premiums and government spending.

Like a giant health maintenance organization, the state caps hospitals’ revenue each year, letting them keep the difference if they reduce inpatient and outpatient treatment while maintaining care quality. Such “global budgets,” which have attracted rare, bipartisan support during a time of rancor over health care, are supposed to make hospitals work harder to keep patients healthy outside their walls.

Maryland’s system, which evolved from a decades-old effort to oversee hospitals as if they were public utilities, regulates all hospital payments by every private and government insurer. That makes it radically different from piecemeal attempts to lasso health spending, such as creating accountable care organizations, which seek savings among smaller groups of patients.

From the program’s launch in 2014 through 2016, per capita hospital spending by all insurers grew by less than 2 percent a year in Maryland. That’s below the economic growth rate, according to new results from the state’s hospital regulator and the federal Department of Health and Human Services.

Keeping hospital spending below economic growth — defined four years ago as 3.58 percent annually — is a key goal for the program and something that rarely happened.

Counting The Savings

The state plan saved the Medicare program for seniors and the disabled about half a billion dollars over three years and achieved “substantial reductions in hospitalization and especially improvements in quality of care,” said a Medicare spokesman.

In the three years measured so far, he added, “the state has already exceeded the required performance for the full five years of the model.”

As high costs for hospital care have been growing more slowly nationwide, Maryland hospital costs over that period rose even less.

“It looks like it has very strong results,” said John McDonough, a Harvard health policy professor who helped craft the federal Affordable Care Act.

What Maryland is doing, he said, “is pretty bold and it’s pretty thoughtfully done and has generated a huge amount of interest around the country.”

Comprehensive results through 2016 are the most recent available from Maryland and HHS, although savings continued last year, Maryland officials said. Independent researchers found mixed results for savings in the earlier years of Maryland’s system.

Maryland’s global budgets saved Medicare $293 million — 1.8 percent of total Medicare spending — in 2014 and 2015, research firm RTI International reported in August.

A separate paper from a team led by Eric Roberts at the University of Pittsburgh found that Maryland’s program in those years couldn’t be clearly credited for reducing hospital use.

The system’s advocates say several years of results are needed to show it’s working.

“These are not fake savings,” said Joseph Antos, an economist at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute who sits on Maryland’s hospital-payment commission. “It didn’t happen instantaneously. It’s taken this number of years to achieve the kinds of savings that you see” for 2016 and beyond.

Even boosters such as Joshua Sharfstein, the former Maryland health secretary who got approval for global budgets from the Obama administration, say the system is far from perfect or finalized.

“There is a range of responses. Some hospitals have been able to do more than others,” said Sharfstein, now an associate dean at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore. “Change in health care is notoriously slow.”

Hospitals have lagged in delivering primary, preventive care to people with chronic conditions such as asthma, diabetes and heart failure, especially in low-income neighborhoods.

Maryland’s system does little to control soaring costs of drugs or nursing home care, doctors’ office treatments and other care not connected to hospitals, although policymakers are working on proposals to do both.

Even so, “what Maryland has done is just so far ahead of many of these other models” to try to control costs, said Dan D’Orazio, a management consultant who has worked with hospitals across the country. One Maryland hospital CEO told him: “This has fundamentally changed how we wake up and do business every day,” D’Orazio said.

Seeing A Difference

At Mercy, described by policymakers as more aggressive than many hospitals in watching costs, about a third of the patients now leave the hospital with medications in hand, said Dr. Wilma Rowe, the hospital’s chief medical officer. That bypasses the tendency for patients to skip a follow-up pharmacy visit and risk landing back in the emergency room.

A statewide data network notifies Mercy and other hospitals when one of their patients ends up in an emergency room somewhere else. That helps coordinate care.

Greater Baltimore Medical Center, north of the city, has hired dozens of primary care doctors to track around 1,000 people with diabetes — staying in touch, advising on diets and keeping them on insulin so they avoid the hospital.

Often clinicians visit elderly patients’ homes to prevent what might turn into an ambulance call and admission, said the hospital’s CEO, Dr. John Chessare.

Before global budgets, “I’d look at the waiting room in the [emergency department], and if it wasn’t full I’d get scared,” he said.

Now he worries it might be full of people who could be better treated elsewhere — including Gilchrist, a GBMC affiliate delivering hospice care for those at the end of life.

These days, he said, “we consider it a defect if someone with chronic disease dies in the hospital.”

 

 

California’s anti-abortion pregnancy centers want the Supreme Court to overturn state notice law

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http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-pregnancy-court-20180318-story.html

California's anti-abortion pregnancy centers want the Supreme Court to overturn state notice law

At a faith-based pregnancy center here, rooms are crammed with baby supplies, both new and used, for expectant mothers, and a medical office contains equipment to allow pregnant women to view their fetuses.

“Life is not about waiting for the storm to pass,” reads a saying on a wall, “but learning to dance in the rain.”

The Alpha Pregnancy Center, located in a storefront on a busy street in the Mission District, is one of about 200 centers in California and thousands across the country pushing the U.S. Supreme Court to spare them from government regulation.

The California centers are challenging a state law that requires them to inform clients that contraception, prenatal care and abortion may be obtained free or at low cost from the state, along with a state phone number for information about Medi-Cal. The law also requires clinics to disclose if they are not licensed.

The case, which will be argued on Tuesday, pits the free speech rights of the anti-abortion centers against government consumer regulations. The decision is likely to affect abortion laws in other states.

The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld California’s law, but similar requirements passed by cities and counties elsewhere in the nation have fared poorly in the courts.

Mark L. Rienzi, a religious liberties lawyer who represents pregnancy clinics, frames the debate as a question of whether the government can force anti-abortion activists to give clients phone numbers of abortion providers.

“Can the government make you say something you don’t want to say?” Rienzi asked. “They are pro-lifers. They exist to tell people you shouldn’t get an abortion.”

Rienzi said 11 states and local governments have passed laws to regulate what the pregnancy centers must tell clients — rules he argues amount to discrimination against abortion opponents.

Other analysts view California’s law as mere consumer protection. It was passed in response to reports that the centers were luring pregnant women without clearly identifying themselves as anti-abortion.

“The law is so clearly constitutional,” said UC Berkeley Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. “It is one thing to compel somebody to speak. It is another thing to say you have to post on your wall information that is completely accurate.”

Rienzi, though, said California has plenty of resources to let low-income women know that they may be eligible for government-assisted contraception and abortion.

“I don’t think the government gets to turn private speakers into government billboards,” he said.

At the Alpha Pregnancy Center, nothing on the outside of the storefront indicates the group opposes abortion, but it states on its website that it does not provide abortion referrals.

The government-required notice is posted not on a wall, but is included near the end of three pages of a handout that deals primarily with privacy rights. Clients are required to sign that they have been given the form.

During a recent visit, only the executive director and a receptionist were working. A woman walked out pushing a baby carriage.

Most of the center’s clients are unmarried and about 80% decide to give birth, said the executive director, who declined to give her name. The center tries to help the women financially with donated goods and offers classes in money management, life skills, time management, child behavior and potty training, she said.

Brochures in the center are designed to steer women away from abortion.

One contains information on fetal development. At eight weeks, “the elbows and fingers can be seen,” it reads. There are photographs of fetuses at various stages.

Another pamphlet describes all that could go wrong with an abortion and links the procedure to breast cancer, mental illness and relationship problems, claims that those on the other side of the debate say are either false or misleading.

Elizabeth Nash, a policy analyst for the Guttmacher Institute, a research organization that favors abortions rights, said some pregnancy centers use deception to lure pregnant women who may be seeking abortions, while others are straightforward and even help women obtain government-funded healthcare.

The Supreme Court’s decision to review California’s 2015 law delighted crisis pregnancy centers, but it doesn’t mean they will win the case. Votes of only four of the nine justices are needed to take a case, and the court does not disclose those votes.

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, often a swing vote, is likely to be the decisive vote in the case, National Institute of Family and Life Advocates v. Becerra, analysts said.

“It’s really hard to know what the Supreme Court is going to do here, ” said Stanford University Law School professor Pamela S. Karlan. “They have two competing impulses.

“On one hand the Supreme Court is extraordinarily receptive to a wide variety of 1st Amendment claims. On the other hand, this is a consumer protection statute, and the Supreme Court has at least so far not shown much interest in telling government they can’t regulate the information” that must be given to medical patients, Karlan said.

Some legal analysts said a ruling against California could hurt the anti-abortion movement by imperiling dozens of state laws that require providers to counsel patients that abortion may harm them.

The Supreme Court’s 1992 decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey said that “counseling requirements are OK in the sense that the state is allowed to prefer childbirth over abortion,” Nash said.

Of 29 states with abortion counseling requirements, 20 require providers to give patients “misleading or inaccurate information” on such topics as fetal pain, fetal personhood, and links between abortion and breast cancer, future fertility and mental illness, she said.

The National Academy of Sciences released a major study Friday that found abortion was safe and debunked claims it increased the risk of infertility, breast cancer and mental illness.

Many of the state laws that require providers to make such claims have not been challenged because of the high costs of litigation, Nash said. But if the Supreme Court rules that California’s law violates free speech, these laws might become stronger targets, she and other analysts said.

“If the state can’t require that pregnant women be able to read a sign that gives them accurate information,” Chemerinsky said, “it seems an even stronger argument that healthcare professionals cannot be forced to utter falsehoods.”

 

Health Care Spending in the United States and Other High-Income Countries

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http://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/in-the-literature/2018/mar/health-care-spending-united-states-other-high-income-countries?omnicid=EALERT1369273&mid=henrykotula@yahoo.com

Synopsis

A study of why the United States spends so much more on health care than in other high-income countries concludes that higher prices — particularly for doctors and pharmaceuticals — and higher administration expenses are predominantly to blame. U.S. policy must focus on reducing these costs in order to close its spending gap with other countries.

The Issue

Pulled Quote
Prices of labor and goods, including pharmaceuticals, and administrative costs appeared to be the major drivers of the difference in overall cost between the United States and other high-income countries.

Health care spending in the United States greatly exceeds that in other wealthy countries, but the U.S. does not achieve better health outcomes. Policymakers commonly attribute this spending disparity to overuse of medical services and underinvestment in social services in the U.S. However, there has been relatively little data analysis performed to confirm that assumption. Writing in JAMA, researchers led by former Commonwealth Fund Harkness Fellow Irene Papanicolas and mentor Ashish Jha, M.D., report findings from their study comparing the U.S. with 10 other high-income countries to better understand why health care spending in the U.S. is so much greater.

Key Findings

  • The U.S. continues to spend more on health care. In 2016, the U.S. spent 17.8 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) on health care, while the average spending level among all high-income countries was 11.5 percent of GDP.
  • The U.S. has lower rates of insurance coverage. While health coverage in the U.S. has risen to 90 percent since enactment of the Affordable Care Act, every other high-income country has achieved coverage for at least 99 percent of its population.
  • The U.S. has mixed levels of population health. While Americans smoke less than people in other wealthy countries do, they have higher rates of obesity and infant mortality. Life expectancy in the U.S. is 78.8 years, nearly three years less than the average life expectancy in high-income countries.
  • Except for diagnostic tests, the U.S. uses health care services at rates similar to those of other countries. Numbers of hospital visits and surgeries performed in the U.S. are similar to those in other countries. However, the U.S. performs 118 MRI scans per 1,000 people, compared to an average of 82 MRIs per 1,000 people among all high-income countries. The U.S. also performs a higher rate of CT scans: 245 per 1,000 people, compared to 151 per 1,000 people among all high-income countries.
  • The U.S. pays more for . . .
    • Doctors. The average salary for a general practitioner in the U.S. is $218,173, nearly double the average salary across all high-income countries. Specialists and nurses in the U.S. also earn significantly more than elsewhere.
    • Pharmaceuticals. The U.S. spends $1,443 per person on pharmaceuticals, compared to the average of $749.
    • Health care administration. The U.S. spends 8 percent of total national health expenditures on activities related to planning, regulating, and managing health systems and services, compared to an average 3 percent spent among all high-income countries.

The Big Picture

The study demonstrates that overall health system performance in the United States does not compare well with that in other wealthy nations, particularly given high U.S. spending — a finding consistent with the Commonwealth Fund’s most recent health system rankings. The health care spending gap with other countries appears to be driven by the high prices the U.S. pays for health care services — particularly doctors, pharmaceuticals, and administration. Compared to its peers, the U.S. has similar levels of spending for social services (including both public and private spending) and similar health care use, neither of which appear to be major causes of the spending gap. To reduce spending, the authors say that U.S. policymakers should focus on lowering prices and administrative costs, rather than just reducing use of health care services.

About the Study

The researchers analyzed data on health care spending, performance, and utilization made available by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and the Commonwealth Fund from 11 high-income countries: Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the U.S.

The Bottom Line

The United States spends more on health care than other countries do because it pays more for health care services and administration.