The poll found 43 percent of Americans are “very or somewhat” worried about medical costs in the coming year, and the top concern (31 percent) is their out-of-pocket costs.
Tag Archives: Public Option
Hillary Clinton’s Health Care Reform Proposals: Anticipated Effects on Insurance Coverage, Out-of-Pocket Costs, and the Federal Deficit
Issue: Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has proposed modifications to the Affordable Care Act to limit consumers’ out-of-pocket health spending.
Goal: We analyzed four of these policies—cost-sharing tax credits to offset spending above 5 percent of income; reduced premium contributions for marketplace enrollees; a fix to the ACA’s “family glitch,” which leaves some families with expensive employer coverage; and the introduction of a public option on the marketplaces.
Methods: RAND’s COMPARE microsimulation model.
Key findings and conclusions: These policies would increase the number of insured individuals by 400,000 to 9.6 million, and decrease consumers’ health spending relative to current law. Cost-sharing tax credits have the biggest effect—increasing coverage by 9.6 million and decreasing average spending by up to 33 percent for those with moderately low incomes. However, the policies with the largest coverage gains also increase the federal deficit, with impacts ranging from –$0.7 billion to $90 billion.
The Health Care Reform Proposals of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump
As president, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump would take the nation down distinctly different paths on health care. In this post, we summarize the health reform proposals of each candidate, and—drawing on new estimates by Christine Eibner and colleagues at RAND Health—compare the proposals’ implications for the total number of people with insurance coverage, people’s out-of-pocket health care costs, and the federal budget.
RAND’s analysis is based on publicly available health care proposals on the candidates’ websites. Where these proposals lacked sufficient clarity for modeling, RAND sought additional information from the campaigns. When answers were not forthcoming, or did not fully resolve questions, RAND made reasonable assumptions that were reviewed and critiqued by independent experts. RAND modeled only those proposals for which it had adequate detail and technical capacity.
The Starting Point
As a starting point, Clinton and Trump propose dramatically different approaches to the Affordable Care Act (ACA): Clinton would maintain the ACA and Trump would repeal it. In estimating the impact of Trump’s proposal, RAND assumes a full repeal of the law including insurance subsidies, expanded eligibility for Medicaid, and individual market reforms such as bans against preexisting condition exclusions. RAND also assumes that repeal would eliminate the ACA’s financing mechanisms such as its Medicare payment reforms and taxes on health plans and medical devices. Consequently, RAND estimates that compared to maintaining the ACA as is, repeal would cause nearly 20 million people to lose their insurance in 2018, increase average premium and out-of-pocket costs for people who buy insurance on their own, and increase the federal deficit. Trump’s repeal of the ACA would increase the federal deficit because the loss of savings from the law’s Medicare reforms and revenues from fees and taxes would be greater than savings from the elimination of insurance subsidies and the Medicaid expansion.
Remember The ‘Public Option’? Insurance Commissioner Wants To Try It In California
Remember The ‘Public Option’? Insurance Commissioner Wants To Try It In California
With major insurers retreating from the federal health law’s marketplaces, California’s insurance commissioner said he supports a public option at the state level that could bolster competition and potentially serve as a test for the controversial idea nationwide.
“I think we should strongly consider a public option in California,” Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones said in a recent interview with California Healthline. “It will require a lot of careful thought and work, but I think it’s something that ought to be on the table because we continue to see this consolidation in an already consolidated health insurance market.”
Nationally, President Barack Obama and other prominent Democrats have revived the idea of the public option in response to insurers such as Aetna Inc. and UnitedHealth Group Inc. pulling back from the individual insurance market and many consumers facing double-digit rate hikes.
The notion of a publicly run health plan competing against private insurers in government exchanges was hotly debated but ultimately dropped from the Affordable Care Act when it passed in 2010.
Health insurers have long opposed the idea, and other critics fear it would lead to a full government-run system
Public vs. Private Health Insurance on Controlling Spending
http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2015/04/16/public-vs-private-health-insurance-on-controlling-spending/
No single fact can settle the long-running debate of whether public or private health insurance is preferable. But by one basic metric, the rate of increase in per capita spending, public insurance has an edge.
There’s a simple fix for Obamacare’s current woes: the public option
http://www.vox.com/2016/8/18/12520820/public-option-health-care-obamacare
THE REALITY IS THAT COMPETITION AMONG PRIVATE INSURERS HAS NEVER LIVED UP TO THE RHETORIC PUT FORTH BY THE INDUSTRY OR FREE MARKET FUNDAMENTALISTS
This week, Aetna announced it would stop selling insurance plans in all but four Obamacare exchanges, the state-run markets set up under the 2010 Affordable Care Act. Aetna, which now covers more than 800,000 people in 15 exchanges, said it had been hemorrhaging money on the plans. (A fight with the government over an acquisition of the insurance company Humana may have played a role, too.)
Aetna’s exit, following similar departures by UnitedHealth and Humana, means that a growing number of US counties — 20 to 25 percent, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation — now have only a single private insurer offering coverage on the exchanges, a development that essentially eliminates consumer choice. One county in Arizona now has no insurers. Even before Aetna’s decision, more than half of state exchanges had four or fewer insurers, with DC, Vermont, Connecticut, and Rhode Island having only two.
It’s enough to make a frazzled health care consumer in one of those feeble markets wish there were another option — perhaps even (dare one say it?) a public option. Does the phrase ring a bell? That’s the health care policy that some policymakers pushed to include in the 2010 law.
Uwe Reinhardt: Adverse risk selection crippling Obamacare
http://www.healthcaredive.com/news/uwe-reinhardt-adverse-risk-selection-crippling-obamacare/425182/
- The ACA has failed to attract enough younger, healthier people to the public insurance exchanges, causing Aetna and other private insurers to exit the market rather than shoulder the costs of sicker people, according to Princeton economist Uwe Reinhardt.
- To deal with adverse risk selection — where sicker-than-average individuals buy insurance while younger, healthier ones don’t — some payers plan to raise premiums more than 25% in 2017.
- That will lead even more young, healthy individuals to forego obtaining ACA coverage, creating even greater adverse risk selection, Reinhardt says.
Cut Healthcare Spending or Face the Public Option
“If we don’t get a handle on spending at some point, we will have a government-financed system,” predicts the head of the Pacific Business Group on Health.”
Sanders convention speech cites Clinton health care concessions
Sanders convention speech cites Clinton health care concessions
In a Democratic convention speech that revisited the agenda of his surprisingly competitive campaign for the nomination, Sanders reminded the audience that while he may have lost the race, he did succeed in convincing Clinton to support three important proposals: a “public option” for Obamacare, letting people join Medicare early, and a big funding increase for community health centers.
“This campaign is about moving the United States toward universal health care and reducing the number of people who are uninsured or underinsured,” Sanders said. “Hillary Clinton wants to see that all Americans to have right to choose public option in their health care exchange.”
5 health and medicine issues to watch for at the Democratic convention
5 health and medicine issues to watch for at the Democratic convention
Hillary Clinton led a health care reform effort in the 1990s, promoted medical research as a senator, and has been bashing price-hiking drug companies on the campaign trail and in TV ads.
So there’s every reason to expect her to make health care a major theme when she accepts the Democratic presidential nomination in Philadelphia on Thursday night. What she says about the future of medical research, public health, and the uninsured will give a valuable preview of what her priorities would be — and how far she’s willing to go to co-opt the ideas of her defeated rival, Bernie Sanders.
Here are the five biggest things to watch in health and medicine:
HENRY KOTULA 