Largest health insurer to keep key parts of law regardless of court ruling
By N.C. Aizenman, Updated: Monday, June 11, 12:01 AM
The nation’s largest health insurer will keep in place several key consumer provisions mandated by the
2010 health-care law regardless of whether the statute survives Supreme Court review.
Officials at UnitedHealthcare will announce Monday that whatever the outcome of the court decision — expected this month — the company will continue to provide customers preventive health-care services without co-payments or other out-of-pocket charges, allow parents to keep adult children up to age 26 on their plans, and maintain the more streamlined appeals process required by the law.
UnitedHealthcare would also continue to observe the law’s prohibitions on putting lifetime limits on insurance payouts and rescinding coverage after a member becomes ill, except in cases where a member intentionally lied on an insurance application.
The provisions are part of a larger package in the law often referred to by supporters as “the Patients Bill of Rights” that took effect as plans renewed after Sept. 23, 2010. They are popular with consumers and relatively uncontroversial among insurers. And there had already been signals from industry insiders that some insurers were likely to leave them in place. UnitedHealthcare, a
UnitedHealth Group company, is the first to publicly commit to the idea.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/largest-health-insurer-to-keep-key-parts-of-law-regardless-of-court-ruling/2012/06/10/gJQA7VYfTV_print.html
Posted June 10, 2012, at 8:04 p.m.
Gov. Paul LePage was the subject of a
glowing editorial in the May 31 Wall Street Journal. It praised him and the Republican majority in the Legislature on the passage last year of the health reform law, PL 90. But the editorial neglected to account for what could amount to a cost shift.
Maine’s dominant insurer, Anthem, is planning for some premium rates under its new HealthChoice Plus product to
be as much as 69 percent less than than its previous HealthChoice product.
For example, an 18-year-old woman with one child would have paid $968 per month under HealthChoice, with a $2,250 deductible. But under HealthChoice Plus she is estimated to pay $297 per month, with a $2,000 deductible.
As the Wall Street Journal stated, any premium decrease is remarkable. That’s true, but it’s not the whole picture. Anyone looking to join a health insurance plan knows to examine not just premiums but what procedures and services are covered and whether the deductible is affordable.
At the same time, the new plan will cover only a certain percentage of the cost of medical service once the deductible is met. The co-insurance under the old plan was 100 percent.
And, there’s a reduction in covered benefits under the new plan, including no maternity coverage and more restrictions on drugs and services.
The Wall Street Journal based its praise of Maine’s deregulation effort on the projected premiums of one company, without a full comparison of Anthem’s products.
Wallack On Vermont's Goal: 'Universal, Affordable Coverage'
KHN's Marilyn Werber Serafini talks to Anya Rader Wallack, tapped to move Vermont toward a single payer health care system, who is confident the state would enact its own individual mandate requiring people to buy insurance if the Supreme Court strikes down the federal mandate. Still, finding the money to replace the lost federal subsidies won't be easy. Wallack says, "We'll have to cover [people] without adding new resources to the system or raising taxes at the state level. Both of those are difficult for a little state."
Posted June 07, 2012, at 5:06 p.m.
Someday soon the U.S. Supreme Court will decide the constitutionality of President Obama’s Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Those who think the court’s decision will close the barn door on the horse of health care reform should not cheer or despair; that horse is long gone. In fact, the whole darn herd of health care change has escaped and is now stampeding across the American health care countryside.
There will be no corralling that thundering herd. Raised on a steady diet of chaotic and inadequate health care, whipped into a state of desperation by ruinous health care costs and run to an exhausted lather by decades of failure of our leaders to fix these problems, the herd is now dubious about the benefits of that old barn.
One such horse is the patient as a new health services shopper. More than 140 million Americans who are self-employed or have employer-based health insurance now pay thousands of dollars each year directly out of pocket for health care, on top of their insurance premiums. They are learning that one can shop for some health care and thereby substantially cut those expenses. This is a rapidly developing and huge potential market force being applied to the simple and ruinous fact our health care has not been a price-sensitive service.
JUNE 11, 2012, 2:10 PM
Choosing a Sugar Substitute
By KENNETH CHANGWhite. Pink. Blue. Yellow.
On restaurant tables everywhere, the colors of the sweetener packets instantly identify the contents.
Sugar. Saccharin. Aspartame. Sucralose.
Reaching for one to pour into a cup of coffee or tea can sometimes feel like sweetener roulette, with the swirl of confusing, conflicting assertions about which are safe and which are not.
Alissa Kaplan Michaels, for one, never picks pink. She still associates saccharin with cancer. The Food and Drug Administration sought to ban it in the 1970s, because rats that gorged on the chemical developed bladder cancer. But Congress imposed a moratorium to delay the ban, and the pink packets of Sweet’N Low remained on restaurant tables. The F.D.A. withdrew its ban proposal in 1991, and the warnings were taken off saccharin in 2000 after research showed that it acts differently in rats and humans, and no conclusive increase in cancers was observed in people. Ms. Michaels, a public relations consultant in New York, knows this.
But, she said, “It’s the cancer in the rats. I can’t get that out of my head.”
Obesity Ills That Won’t Budge Fuel Soda Battle by Bloomberg
A hospital offers Zumba and cooking classes. Farmers markets dole out $2 coupons for cantaloupe and broccoli. An adopt-a-bodega program nudges store owners to stock low-fat milk. And one apartment building even slowed down its elevator, and lined its stairwells with artwork, to entice occupants into some daily exercise. In the Bronx, where more than two-thirds of adults are overweight, the message has been unmistakably clear for a long time: Slim down now.
But, if anything, this battery of efforts points to how intractable the obesity problem has become in New York’s poorest borough. The number of the overweight and obese continue to grow faster in the Bronx than anywhere else in the city — nearly one in three Bronx adults is obese — leading the city’s health commissioner to call it “ground zero for the obesity epidemic problem.” So it was to the weight-burdened Bronx that Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg went last week to make the case for his controversial proposal to ban supersized sodas and sugary drinks. Standing in the lobby of Montefiore Medical Center, the borough’s largest hospital, he was flanked by doctors who spoke of treating more patients than ever with diabetes, hypertension and other obesity-related diseases. Critics have described the proposed soda rule as interfering with a matter of personal choice, calling instead for less intrusive means to address the obesity problem, through education and access to healthy foods. But the Bronx experience helps explain why Mr. Bloomberg and city health officials embraced the aggressive new regulatory tack after years of trying, and failing, to curb obesity through those types of measures.
Maine could lose local control by not starting work on a health insurance exchange.
Even with the constitutionality of the federal Affordable Care Act in doubt, many states are positioning themselves to be ready to comply with a key provision of the federal law: insurance exchanges.
Maine is not one of them.
Maine is among many states deferring action until the U.S. Supreme Court rules on constitutional challenges to the law. Those states could be holding out to their own detriment. They risk losing local control of how their exchanges would be run and having the federal government impose its own version on them.
5 Myths About Canada’s Health Care System
The truth may surprise you about international health care
By Aaron E. Carroll, M.D., M.S.
AARP Newsletter, April 16, 2012
How does the U.S. health care system stack up against Canada’s? You’ve probably heard allegedly true
horror stories about the Canadian system — like 340-day waits for knee replacement surgery, for example.
To separate fact from fiction, Aaron E. Carroll, M.D., the director of the Center for Health Policy and Professionalism Research in Indianapolis, identified the top myths about the two health care systems.
Myth #1: Canadians are flocking to the United States to get medical care.
How many times have you heard that Canadians, frustrated by long wait times and rationing where they live, come to the United States for medical care?
I don’t deny that some well-off people might come to the United States for medical care. If I needed a heart or lung transplant, there’s no place I’d rather have it done. But for the vast, vast majority of people, that’s not happening.
http://www.pnhp.org/print/news/2012/june/5-myths-about-canada’s-health-care-system
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