When It Comes to Seeing a Doctor in California, the Uninsured Still Fare Worst

http://www.chcf.org/articles/2017/01/when-seeing-doctor

California Physicians Accepting New Patients by Payer, 2015

With repeal of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) on the horizon, and no replacement plan in sight, millions of Californians are at risk of losing their coverage. Approximately 5 million Californians are currently covered under the ACA. The state’s uninsured rate, which hit a historic low under the ACA, could start to rise again depending on what happens in Washington in the coming weeks and months.

It’s worth remembering the multiple barriers that people without insurance face in our health care system. I am reminded of some key findings from a 2015 survey of California physicians that the University of California, San Francisco, released last fall with support from the California Health Care Foundation.

The survey asked, among other questions, if physicians were accepting new patients who had various types of insurance (private, Medicare, or Medi-Cal) or who were uninsured. The survey also asked physicians if any of their existing patients were uninsured.

As the slides below show, the uninsured face the hardest time getting accepted into a physician’s practice. Only 38% of all California physicians said they accepted new uninsured patients in 2015; only 55% said they had any uninsured patients. The sample of physicians includes emergency department (ED) doctors who are legally required to see all persons who come to an ED, regardless of whether they have insurance.

Healthcare Triage: Donald Trump and Healthcare Cost Sharing

Healthcare Triage: Donald Trump and Healthcare Cost Sharing

Image result for Healthcare Triage: Donald Trump and Healthcare Cost Sharing

One of the few things that both Donald trump and Hilary Clinton seemed to agree on is that high out-of-pocket spending, specifically as it relates to the Affordable Care Act, is a problem. One of Clinton’s most popular health care proposals during her campaign was to reduce out of pocket spending to more “manageable” levels for many Americans. President-elect Trump sought to fix this problem by repealing the ACA and replacing it with something better.

Reducing out-of-pocket spending, however, will require some tradeoffs. No easy solution exists, but there are examples out there worthy of consideration. That’s the topic of this week’s Healthcare Triage.

Who pays for war on Planned Parenthood?

http://www.fresnobee.com/opinion/editorials/article124977729.html?utm_campaign=CHL%3A+Daily+Edition&utm_source=hs_email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=40612592&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-9LselH-wiu-loS_ePlL-q1z4YWLvVwoqV-OpQTh47u3NfJb5vHpDsS_ASUb-Rf_gelQDO3_8OTQCcoHHVaptBrra60kw&_hsmi=40612592

Planned Parenthood supporters in Los Angeles rally in 2015 for women’s access to reproductive health care on National Pink Out Day. Republicans in Congress this week announced plans to strip the group of federal funding.

The 15-month, $1.6 million congressional “investigation” into Planned Parenthood is finally over, with the chilling announcement that Republicans in charge plan now to eviscerate the nonprofit most associated with reproductive rights.

Tennessee’s Rep. Marsha Blackburn and the fellow Republicans on her “Select Panel on Infant Lives” – launched last year in the wake of the bogus “fetal parts” video smear led by California anti-abortion activist David Daleiden – issued their “recommendations” on Wednesday, with no Democratic input and zero proof of wrongdoing. Baseless as the proposals were, House Speaker Paul Ryan swiftly announced that at least one – senselessly stripping Planned Parenthood of hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funds – will be among the first orders of business.

Blackburn also called for bans on abortion at 20 weeks and federal funding for research using fetal tissue. Never mind that the former is unconstitutional and the latter saves lives.

This crusade against Planned Parenthood in particular – and reproductive rights in general – is misogynistic, archaic and counterproductive. Good people can disagree on the morality of abortion, but women have had the right to choose for more than 40 years and polls show the vast majority of Americans want to keep it that way.

In the name of placating evangelicals in their base and attacking one of Democrats’ favored organizations, congressional Republicans have singled out a health care provider that annually serves 2.5 million sometimes desperate humans. About nine in 10 Planned Parenthood clients come for services that have nothing to do with pregnancy termination. Eight in 10 are on Medicaid; many of the rest have no insurance.

Uncertainty. Opportunity. It’ll all be there for healthcare in 2017, PwC says

http://www.healthcaredive.com/news/uncertainty-opportunity-itll-all-be-there-for-healthcare-in-2017-pwc-sa/432384/

You reap what you sow. The idea is the push behind countless movie plots and rock songs but it’s also a central theme to PricewaterhouseCooper’s (PwC) Health Research Institute’s (HRI) new report on healthcare trends to watch out for in 2017. The seeds for next year were planted in 2007, according to the new report.

There will be certain uncertainty over the fate of the Affordable Care Act next year. However, many of the trends that should be on top-of-mind for hospital administrators next year will relate to value-based care, Trine Tsouderos, PwC’s Health Research Institute director, told Healthcare Dive. “If you think about the political changes as the waves on the surface of the ocean, there’s a very strong current underneath that is the shift to value-based care,” she said. “We do not see that changing. We see the shift continuing industry-wide despite any changes in Washington, DC.”

For example, only 90 or so retail clinics were in operation and about one in 10 consumers have been to one in 2016. Today, more than 3,000 such clinics have been propped up across the U.S. with one in three consumers having visited one. This drift highlights the continued move to more convenience in healthcare access as well as price transparency for patients.

Sticking with the nautical theme, Tsouderos likened the healthcare industry to a battleship in explaining why ideas from 10 years ago are now coming to fruition. It takes a long time to change the course of such a large and complex ship. “You can’t turn [the industry] on a dime,” she said.

What emerging trends administrators should know for 2017

https://www.pwc.com/us/en/health-industries/top-health-industry-issues.html

 

It’s Easy for Obamacare Critics to Overlook the Merits of Medicaid Expansion

At a national level, the expansion of Medicaid continues to yield benefits. Its coverage was increased, and its quality raised. Some states that have expanded Medicaid are even expecting net savings for the next few years. In states where Medicaid was expanded, hospitals had fewer uninsured visits.

Focusing on only the positives can be as misleading as focusing on only the negatives. Policy decisions, including those involving health, need to be considered in terms of trade-offs. It is true that providing Medicaid can cost the federal government, and even states, a lot of money, which can’t then be spent on other worthy pursuits. It is true that Medicaid reimburses physicians and hospitals less generously, and that it often leaves beneficiaries with fewer choices than private insurance might.

But when we look at the balance sheet for Medicaid — health benefits, financial security, societal improvements through education — it’s not hard to argue that money allocated to Medicaid is well spent.

 

Many Insured Children Lack Essential Health Care, Study Finds

A new study to be released on Monday by the Children’s Health Fund, a nonprofit based in New York City that expands access to health care for disadvantaged children, found that one in four children in the United States did not have access to essential health care, though a record number of young people now have health insurance.

The report found that 20.3 million people in the nation under the age of 18 lack “access to care that meets modern pediatric standards.”

Guidelines issued by the American Academy of Pediatrics say that all children should get health maintenance visits for immunizations and other preventive services; management of acute and chronic medical conditions; access to mental health support and dental care; and have round-the-clock availability of emergency services and timely access to subspecialists.

While Medicaid and many private insurance plans recommend or require that all of those services be provided, under the umbrella of what is known as the medical home, the study found that millions of insured children are not receiving many of the benefits.

There are many children with insurance who cannot get primary care and those who do can often have problems getting specialty care.

As President-elect Donald J. Trump, a Republican, vows to repeal some, if not all, of the Affordable Care Act, which extended health care coverage to an additional 20 million people, the report’s authors worry that even more children could have trouble receiving the care they need.

“The fact that more than 20 million children in the U.S. experience insurance and noninsurance barriers to getting comprehensive and timely health care is a challenge that needs to get the highest-priority attention from the new administration,” said the report’s lead author, Dr. Irwin Redlener, president of the nonprofit Children’s Health Fund and a professor of pediatrics and health policy and management at Columbia University.

Over the past two decades, the number of children without health insurance has steadily decreased to 3.3 million last year from around 10 million in 1997, according to an analysis of federal data and the federal government’s 2015 National Health Interview Survey.

The effort to extend coverage began 50 years ago with the creation of Medicaid, which provides health insurance for the poor. It continued more recently with the Children’s Health Insurance Program, which offers low-cost coverage to those who make too much money to qualify for Medicaid and, under the Obama administration, with the Affordable Care Act, offering subsidized coverage and state exchanges.

 

True value-based care is a trillion-dollar unicorn for the health care industry

True value-based care is a trillion-dollar unicorn for the health care industry

In Silicon Valley, Kendall Square, and points in between, unicorns are more than mythical creatures that adorn software engineers’ ironic T-shirts. They’re disruptive technology behemoths with billion-dollar-plus valuations. These beasts have largely shied away from the health technology sphere over the last decade, despite many promising upstarts. Maybe we’ve been hunting for the wrong kind.

Get ready for the uber-unicorn. It won’t be a single, enormous company with a trillion-dollar valuation. Instead, it’s a movement called value-based care.

Value-based care isn’t a new concept. But it’s been used a bit bashfully, traditionally referring to carrot-and-stick-based incentive payments and penalties for physicians. Today these pale in comparison to the fee-for-service care that rewards reactive, episodic, paternalistic care — and lots of it.

Here’s what I mean by true value-based care: fully capitated payment contracts in which a lump sum of money is available to treat a patient over the course of a year. No penalties or incentives, simply ownership of the total cost of care and the total cost of outcomes. The better the care, the more money the organization bearing the risk receives. This is how to best reward exceedingly efficient, effective health care.

 

 

CVS Health to cut 600 corporate jobs

http://www.healthcaredive.com/news/cvs-health-to-cut-600-corporate-jobs-1/429798/

CVS Health employs more than 240,000 people in the U.S., many of whom work in retail positions or as pharmacists at its 9,600 pharmacies. But with increased competition in the drugstore retail space, CVS Health is starting to let some of those positions go.

Recently, the retailer has been buffeted by the likes of Walgreens, Rite Aid, and Wal-Mart Stores jockeying for sales of medications and health care services. Today’s drugstores compete with doctors and healthcare clinics as well as with retailers like Sephora and Ulta in beauty, and of course, general merchandisers like Target and, increasingly, Amazon, in consumer goods. The retailer may also be wary of the proposed merger between rivals Walgreens and Rite Aid.

An uptick in lower-priced generic pharmacy sales and a decline in store traffic muted CVS Health in its previous quarter. Sales grew 2.1% in Q2, missing analyst expectations for a 2.5% rise and trailing well behind the 4.2% increase that CVS posted in the first quarter of this year. Non-pharmacy same-store sales fell 2.5% in Q2, the company added. The drugstore retailer is due to release its third quarter results next week.

While the Affordable Care Act has expanded some opportunities for drugstore retailers to offer more medical services, the law has also helped lower some healthcare costs, as it was intended to do, which could hit retail sales. CVS also left a lot of money on the table when it ceased sales of tobacco products two years ago.

An ACA primer: Much more than insurance

http://www.healthcaredive.com/news/an-aca-primer-much-more-than-insurance/429497/

Remember the Affordable Care Act? Enacted in 2010, it expanded healthcare insurance to millions of uninsured Americans and increased access to care. But the ACA is much more than expanded coverage; it set in motion a variety of reforms in the healthcare delivery systems aimed at lowering costs and improving quality of care.

That fact was lost on presidential candidate Donald Trump, who told Fox News recently, “I don’t use much Obamacare, I must be honest with you, because it is so bad for the people and they can’t afford it.” Trump’s comments imply Obamacare is an insurance plan people can buy, which is not the case. As we wrap up year six since the ACA was enacted, here‘s what the law is really about and how it impacts providers.

Editor’s Corner: Lack of preventive care in the US may hurt hospitals

http://www.fiercehealthcare.com/finance/lack-preventative-care-u-s-could-wind-up-deeply-damaging-hospitals?utm_medium=nl&utm_source=internal&mrkid=959610&mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiTlRSaU16TTJNREEwTUdZeSIsInQiOiJDTzgyZXFNZW1rc0hNb28wOE41R0hkcUVLSE9nb3pHemVGTFY0ZEJ0OFNkXC9UODNLaDNUYXRxR281Z2NMbWJET01wZGRlQ3FvNlFsSWJ1RHpVMjZKbmxoVHNMa1Y0b3ArNFRmbktOSUtvWm89In0%3D

Editor's corner

Bold statements are fairly rare from the heads of large hospital systems, but Robert Ostrowsky, the head of RWJBarnabas Health, made a pretty strong assertion in a recent interview with the Asbury Park Press: Hospitals should keep their communities healthy. But they don’t.

“It’s not easy because no one is willing to pay for that right now, meaning I don’t get reimbursed by insurance companies to keep somebody healthy and the government doesn’t seem to want to pay us to keep someone healthy,” Ostrowsky told the publication. “They all prefer to pay us when someone gets sick and they want us to spend less when that person is sick. That’s where the concentration has been. But an ounce of prevention. If they would take X number of dollars and say, ‘Here, use it to keep people healthy,’ actuarially, that will show you eventually spend less on sickness care.”

That needs to change for a variety of reasons that have begun to cascade into something profound. Princeton economist Alan Krueger has recently published a study (.pdf) showing a strong correlation between poor health and lack of workforce participation.