http://www.politico.com/story/2017/05/24/cbo-obamacare-repeal-health-care-238795
Here are some key facts and figures from the new CBO report on the American Health Care Act, the House-passed bill to repeal and replace Obamacare. CBO stressed the uncertainty of its estimates, given that it’s hard to know which states would take up the chance to opt out of certain key parts of Obamacare. All figures are for the decade spanning 2017-2026 unless otherwise specified.
http://www.beckershospitalreview.com/finance/trump-s-4-1-trillion-budget-9-healthcare-takeaways.html
President Donald Trump’s first full budget proposal will include $3.6 trillion in spending cuts to balance the budget in the next decade.
Although the full $4.1 trillion budget plan, titled “A New Foundation for American Greatness,” will be released Tuesday, Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney briefed White House reporters Monday on the budget.
Here are nine of the key proposals related to healthcare in President Trump’s budget proposal for fiscal year 2018, which begins Oct. 1.
1. Medicaid cuts. President Trump’s budget includes $610 billion in Medicaid cuts over 10 years. The reduction is in addition to the $839 billion pulled from Medicaid under the proposed American Health Care Act, the ACA repeal and replacement bill that phases out Medicaid expansion, according to The Hill.
2. Repeal and replace the ACA. The budget assumes passage of the AHCA. The Trump administration expects to save $250 billion over 10 years by repealing and replacing the ACA. These savings are in addition to the $610 billion in proposed Medicaid cuts in the budget, according to The New York Times.
3. Medicare unscathed. The budget makes no changes to the Medicare program or to core Social Security benefits, two programs President Trump vowed during his campaign to leave alone, according to The Hill.
4. Reduction in CHIP funding. Under the budget, $5.8 billion would be cut from the Children’s Health Insurance Program over 10 years, according to a budget document posted by The Washington Post.
5. NIH funding cut. Under the budget proposal, the National Institutes of Health budget would be reduced from $31.8 billion to $26 billion, according to The Washington Post.
6. Cuts to CDC funding. Several CDC programs would be hit with cuts under the budget proposal. One of the biggest cuts is to the agency’s chronic disease prevention programs, which would have funding reduced by $222 million, according to The Washington Post.
7. Veterans Choice Program extended. The budget calls for extension of the Veterans Choice Program, which allows veterans to go outside of the Veterans Affairs system for care. Under the budget, $29 billion more would be spent on this program over 10 years, according to The New York Times.
8. Medical malpractice limits. The budget includes medical malpractice reforms, such as capping awards for noneconomic damages, that are intended to reduce the practice of defensive medicine. The Trump administration expects these changes to save Medicare $31 billion over a decade, according to The New York Times.
9. Funds substance abuse treatment. The budget would allocate $500 million to expand access to treatments, including medication-assisted treatment, for those suffering from opioid addiction. The budget also includes $1.9 billion in block grants for states to use for substance abuse treatment and $25 million for the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration for expanding access to critical interventions. SAMHSA would also receive an additional $24 million to equip first responders with overdose reversing drugs.
Medicaid, the nation’s public health insurance program for low-income children, adults, seniors, and people with disabilities, covers 1 in 5 Americans, including many with complex and costly needs for medical care and long-term services. Most people covered by Medicaid would be uninsured or underinsured without it. The Affordable Care Act (ACA) expanded Medicaid to reach low-income adults previously excluded from the program and provided federal funding to states for the vast majority of the cost of newly eligible adults.
President Trump and other GOP leaders have called for far-reaching changes to Medicaid, including caps on federal funding for the program. In the debate about Medicaid’s future, some critics of the program have made statements that are at odds with data, research, and basic information about Medicaid. To inform policy decisions that may have significant implications for Medicaid, the low-income people it serves, and the states, this brief highlights 10 key Medicaid facts.
https://www.axios.com/no-medicaid-isnt-broken-2404950733.html
The bottom line: Medicaid isn’t broken — at least, not any more than private insurance is.
Finding doctors: The biggest problem that’s usually cited with Medicaid is that people have trouble finding doctors who will take them. And there are troubles with low Medicaid provider reimbursement rates and physician access, but they vary around the country. It’s not hard to find a state, or more typically a region within a state, where physician access is a real problem.
But overall:
Costs aren’t out of control: Medicaid spending did jump to 10.5% in 2015 with the Affordable Care Act coverage expansion, but it dropped to 5.9% in 2016 and is projected to grow by 4.5% this year.
And per capita Medicaid costs are not rising faster than costs for private insurance. In fact, they’re projected to grow more slowly.
Some would say that’s because Medicaid underpays providers, and it does pay substantially less than Medicare in many states. Others would say, good for Medicaid; it drives a tougher bargain with providers while getting results comparable to other payers.
The AHCA would take more than 800 billion dollars out of Medicaid over the next decade by reducing funding for the Medicaid expansion and capping federal Medicaid spending. The architects of the AHCA may believe Medicaid dollars are better spent elsewhere or not spent at all, or that somehow states can make Medicaid work better with far less money.
There are many principled conservative arguments for smaller government. But the argument that Medicaid is “broken” is not one of them; it is more urban legend than fact.
http://www.healthaffairs.org/healthpolicybriefs/brief.php?brief_id=162
Ongoing reforms are expanding the landscape of telehealth in the US health care system, but challenges remain.
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Despite the fact that no other developed country even comes close to the United States in annual spending on health care, 20 percent of Americans still live in areas where shortages of physicians and health care specialists exist, and the United States still ranks the lowest overall among eleven industrialized countries on measures of health system efficiency, access to care, equity, and healthy lives. Many believe that the answer to issues of cost and access in the US health system lies in telehealth, which increases access to care, alleviates travel costs and burdens, and allows more convenient treatment and chronic condition monitoring. With the implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), the federal government announced the move toward encouraging and including telehealth services in health care coverage. The ACA, however, only implemented telehealth at the federal level through Medicare, in selected circumstances; the power to determine which, if any, telehealth services is covered by Medicaid still remains largely within the powers of individual states. Also, states can govern private payer telehealth reimbursement policies. This means that telehealth implementation varies from state to state in terms of what services providers will be reimbursed for delivering, as well as what sort of “parity,” defined as “equivalent treatment of analogous services,” is expected between in-person health services reimbursements and telehealth reimbursements. This variation affects providers’ ability to implement telehealth options, thereby reducing the patients’ ability to use these services and become comfortable with the telehealth processes. Consequently, telehealth faces significant obstacles in becoming an accepted and used health care option for individuals, and states and the nation as a whole cannot fully realize the cost savings of telehealth. |
For those with pre-existing medical conditions, the House-passed health bill became notorious for a last-minute addition that would let insurers once again charge them higher premiums in the individual market based on their health status. But the focus on this single provision distracts from a troubling fact: even without it, the bill would threaten health care for those with pre-existing conditions in four broader ways.
A per capita cap would set annual limits on federal funding per beneficiary that would grow more slowly than actual health care costs. A block grant would cap the amount of overall federal Medicaid funding the state could receive. Either way, states would receive significantly less federal funding compared to current law, under which the federal government pays a fixed share of state Medicaid costs, and the funding cuts would grow deeper each year.
Faced with large cuts in federal funding, states would have no choice but to sharply cut their programs. Consequently, tens of millions of people with pre-existing conditions – including millions of children with disabilities and special health care needs – would face the threat of Medicaid cuts. They could lose coverage entirely or go without needed care as states scaled back covered benefits and payments to medical providers.
Home- and community-based services, an optional Medicaid benefit that most states already limit based on available funds, would be at particular risk. These services, which include nursing and home health care and help with chores, meals, transportation, and other services, let seniors and other low-income people with serious health problems remain in their homes instead of having to go to a nursing home.
That would force states to pay three to five times more for the ACA’s Medicaid expansion. Most or all of the 31 states and Washington, D.C. that have adopted it would have no choice but to drop it because they could no longer afford it.
The Medicaid expansion now covers 11 million people, including many who have pre-existing conditions. For example, almost 30 percent of those benefitting from the Medicaid expansion have a mental illness or substance use disorder. By effectively ending the Medicaid expansion starting in 2020, the House bill would leave millions of low-income people with pre-existing conditions without coverage.
For example, a 60-year-old woman with $22,000 of annual income who faced the national average benchmark premium would pay $8,200 more in premiums after accounting for federal tax credits than she does now. The Congressional Budget Office projects that uninsured rates for people age 50-64 would double due to the House bill. Some 84 percent of people age 55-64 have pre-existing health conditions.
Plans would no longer need to offer a comprehensive set of benefits and could exclude even core benefits such as maternity services and mental health care. Nor would they have to limit the amount that people with expensive health care must pay out-of-pocket for deductibles and other cost-sharing each year. Insurers could again place annual and lifetime limits not only on individual and small-group plans but also on coverage that people get from large employers, leaving millions with costly pre-existing conditions to once again worry about exhausting their benefits.
All told, then, the House bill would bring back the highly-flawed, pre-ACA individual insurance market that made it impossible for millions with pre-existing conditions to get adequate, affordable health coverage. Additionally, it would threaten the coverage of millions of Medicaid recipients with pre-existing conditions.
That’s not a health care system that should make us proud.
“Don’t touch my Medicare” has been a rallying cry in recent years, first as Congress considered health reform and now as it debates the fate of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). While the bill that would repeal and replace the ACA—the American Health Care Act (AHCA)—does not include explicit changes to Medicare, the legislation could have a profound impact on the 11 million Medicare beneficiaries who also rely on Medicaid for key components of their care. Here’s a look at how the ACHA’s major changes in federal funding for Medicaid would affect low-income older adults and the Medicare program.
Low-income Medicare beneficiaries who also are enrolled in Medicaid—often referred to as “dual eligibles”—could be disproportionately affected by congressional efforts to cut and cap federal Medicaid financing. Not only do these older adults account for one-third of all Medicaid spending, much of the Medicaid spending for low-income Medicare beneficiaries is “optional” for states.1
The nearly three-quarters (72%) of dual eligibles who receive full Medicaid benefits are most at risk under the AHCA’s funding caps.2 They tend to be in poorer health than other Medicare (and Medicaid) beneficiaries, and rely on Medicaid for high-cost services.3 While Medicare covers physician, hospital, and most other acute care, Medicaid covers some of dual eligibles’ behavioral health services as well as most of their long-term services and supports, such as nursing home and home and community-based services. Under federal law, many of these services are optional. Similarly, many low-income Medicare beneficiaries who qualify for Medicaid are “optional” beneficiaries who qualify only when they incur health and long-term care costs that are well in excess of their incomes. States can drop optional services and optional enrollees even without any new federal flexibility.
When stripped of emotion and hyperbole, the debate about repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act (ACA) is fundamentally about how to stretch limited funds to offer health care to two populations in need: the poor, who receive health care through Medicaid, and the “near-poor,” who were frequently without coverage prior to the ACA’s enactment. While millions of the near-poor remain uninsured today, six out of 10 limited-income individuals who purchased health care through the ACA’s health insurance Marketplaces were uninsured prior to the ACA. It is this near-poor and recently insured population, and how to cost-effectively provide health care for them, that is the focus of this post.
Many insurers have ably managed their sicker- and poorer-than-expected Marketplace membership by borrowing from the playbook of the most similar market, Medicaid. In short, we believe that the “Medicaidization” of the Marketplaces is a necessary and positive trend, and we remind policy makers that regardless of legislation or regulatory change, health plans must employ the Medicaidization playbook to well-serve a population that both parties believe needs coverage.
Health insurance Marketplaces—the centerpiece of the ACA—provide health insurance in government-refereed individual and small-group markets. However, health plans offering coverage through Marketplaces have been confronted with challenges. Enrollment is roughly 12 million, far behind original Congressional Budget Office projections of 21 million by 2016. This is largely because fewer employers than expected dropped employee coverage after the law passed and because many younger and healthier people have chosen to remain uninsured or covered by their parents’ insurance. As a whole, Marketplace enrollees are sicker and more costly than expected, and more than 80 percent receive means-tested subsidies to buy down some of their insurance costs. Furthermore, lawsuits and congressional actions have hobbled the ACA’s risk mitigation programs and threaten its subsidies. As a result, several health plans left the Marketplaces in 2017 in many states, and at least one—Humana—will exit entirely in 2018.
While the struggles of the ACA-reformed markets and the insurers that operate within those markets are well-documented, there have also been some success stories. Medicaid-focused health plans, as well as commercial plans that adopted tactics common in the Medicaid market, have performed at near break-even or better while serving the near-poor population in the Marketplaces. The relative success of Medicaid-focused plans in the Marketplaces contrasts with the struggles of national for-profit insurers and has led to the Medicaidization of the Marketplaces.
The term “Medicaidization” is not new to this post. It has been used by others, sometimes with a negative connotation. So it is helpful to define the term more precisely. Medicaidization, as used here, describes a set of practices—from sensitivity to sociocultural issues to utilization management—that have evolved to serve the Medicaid population. Because of socioeconomic disadvantage and poor health, this population responds to its health care needs very differently than other populations. However, the term “Medicaidization” belies the fact that health plans beyond those that focus on Medicaid are capable of deploying these same practices—such as several Blues and provider-owned plans—as described below.
The House managed to narrowly pass its ObamaCare repeal bill by finding a delicate balance between hard-line conservatives and moderates. Now the Senate is looking to achieve the same feat, only with a smaller margin for error.
Senate moderates have already put their markers down on the healthcare issues that concern them the most. Individual senators hold much more power in advancing the health bill than individual House members, and if Senate Republicans can’t find a balance among their caucus, the ObamaCare repeal effort could be doomed.
The Senate will only need 51 votes to pass the bill, but because of their slim majority, Republicans can only afford to lose two votes.
The centrist senators have several major concerns with the House bill, known as the American Health Care Act (AHCA), most notably its changes to Medicaid.
The Affordable Care Act allows states to expand Medicaid coverage to more people, funded mostly by the federal government. So far, 31 states and D.C. have done so.
Even as the healthcare bill was working its way through the House, moderate GOP senators hailing from states that took the Medicaid expansion objected to the proposed cuts to the program.
In early March, Republican Sens. Rob Portman (Ohio), Shelly Moore Capito (W.Va.) Cory Gardner (Colo.) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) sent a letter to Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) objecting to the Medicaid cuts in the House bill. “We will not support a plan that does not include stability for Medicaid expansion populations or flexibility for states,” the lawmakers wrote.
The legislation has changed since then, but the Medicaid provisions have been largely left alone. The House bill would undo ObamaCare’s Medicaid expansion by 2020, and would cut over $800 billion from the program.
After the House passed the legislation last week, Portman, Capito and Sen. Dean Heller (R-Nev.) were quick to say they still opposed the bill because of the Medicaid provisions.
Capito on Monday said she would like to see some form of Medicaid expansion remain permanent.
“I have seen a lot benefits to the Medicaid expansion in our state, particularly in the mental health and opioid and drug abuse areas,” Capito told reporters. As for the people who have gained coverage through expansion, Capito said “you can’t just drop them off and wish them good luck. “
Moderates have also objected to the fact that the most recent estimates of an earlier version of the House bill would have resulted in 24 million fewer people having insurance coverage over a decade.
Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) has crafted, along with Collins, a different ObamaCare replacement bill that would allow states to decide whether they want to keep ObamaCare or enact something different.
Cassidy has repeatedly objected to the House version of the legislation because he says it doesn’t fulfill President Trump’s promises to “lower premiums, maintain coverage and protect those with pre-existing conditions.” During a May 8 speech at the American Hospital Association, Cassidy said that while the AHCA may lower premiums, it does so by giving people “terrible coverage.”
Aside from coverage issues, abortion is also likely to cause some headaches in the Senate.
The primary group in the Senate working on the bill includes prominent conservatives like Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Mike Lee (R-Utah), who are likely to insist that the Senate keep a provision from the House that largely strips Planned Parenthood of funding. But Collins has said any Planned Parenthood language is a non-starter.
Moderates are also likely to insist on making sure language is removed from the House bill that would prohibit the bill’s tax credits from being used to purchase coverage on insurance plans that cover abortion. That could be a major problem for conservatives, especially if the revised bill is to have any chance at passing the House again.
Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas) on Monday acknowledged the balancing act leaders will need to pull off. “Now it’s a question of building consensus within the Republican conference. All 52 Republican senators are going to be part of the process … because we’re going to need everybody.”
Cornyn also said he wasn’t concerned about losing votes if the Planned Parenthood language remained in the bill.
A Squeaker In The House Becomes Headache For The Senate: 5 Things To Watch
After weeks of will-they-or-won’t-they tensions, the House managed to pass its GOP replacement for the Affordable Care Act on Thursday by a razor-thin margin. The vote was 217-213.
Democrats who lost the battle are still convinced they may win the political war. As the Republicans reached a majority for the bill, Democrats on the House floor began chanting, “Na, na, na, na … Hey, hey, hey … Goodbye.” They claim Republicans could lose their seats for supporting a bill that could cause so much disruption in voters’ health care.
Now the bill — and the multitude of questions surrounding it — moves across the Capitol to the Senate. And the job doesn’t get any easier. With only a two-vote Republican majority and no likely Democratic support, it would take only three GOP “no” votes to sink the bill.
Democrats have made clear they will unanimously oppose the bill. “Trumpcare” is just a breathtakingly irresponsible piece of legislation that would endanger the health of tens of millions of Americans and break the bank for millions more,” said Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.).
And Republicans in the Senate have their own internal disagreements, too.
Here are five of the biggest flashpoints that could make trouble for the bill in the upper chamber.
