Health insurance costs grew slowly for two years. Now, they’re speeding up.
By Sarah Kliff ,
U.S. spending on health insurance grew at an accelerated rate in 2011, breaking a two-year trend of smaller cost increases. The culprit, a new study suggests, is not Americans seeking more treatment but rather rapid growth in the price of medical care.
Spending for private health insurance surged by 4.6 percent in 2011, according to a report from the Health Care Cost Institute. That growth rate is faster than the rest of the economy and higher than the previous year, which had 3.8 percent growth.
Average spending on a private insurance patient rose to $4,547 in 2011, compared with $4,349 in 2010. That statistic suggests that a recent downturn in health-care spending may have been a temporary product of the recession rather than a more permanent change, as some health-care economists have hoped.
“We don’t know yet whether this is a one-off year aberration or a resumption of patterns of higher growth,” said Health Care Cost Institute Director David Newman. “We just don’t know. When you have one data point, you’re cautious.”
The Health Care Cost Institute used data from 40 million Americans with private insurance provided by health plans such as Aetna and Kaiser Permanente. The research does not include data on public insurance programs, such as Medicare and Medicaid, which the federal government will make available in early 2013.
Employers typically have tried to control costs by reducing the volume of care delivered, whether that means higher co-pays for doctor visits or using prevention to catch costly diseases earlier.
The Democrats' Market-Friendly Health-Care Alternative
The Romney-Ryan vision would slash federal health spending by shifting costs to seniors, businesses and states while empowering insurance companies to ration care.
By EZEKIEL J. EMANUEL ,
NEERA TANDEN And DONALD BERWICK
Many commentators, including The Wall Street Journal, frame the health-care debate as a choice between government control and individual choice. But that is a false contrast. The choice is really between encouraging health-care providers to be more efficient, innovative and focused on keeping patients healthy—or shifting the financial burden to patients, businesses and states. The latter approach harms seniors and others, and it will fail to control health-care costs.
The Romney-Ryan health-care plan recasts Medicare as a voucher program. If the voucher's value fails to keep pace with rising health-care costs, seniors will be forced to pay ever more to buy private insurance. There is no evidence that competition among insurance plans would do anything to address the underlying costs of health-care providers.
Medicare working to boost Obama in swing states, poll finds
By Jon Cohen and Peyton M. Craighill,
Voters in three critical swing states broadly oppose the sweeping changes to Medicare proposed by Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan and, by big margins, favor President Obama over Mitt Romney on the issue, according to new state polls by The Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation.
Among seniors, the issue rivals the economy as a top voting issue, undercutting Romney’s appeal in Florida, Ohio and Virginia. Generally, the more voters focus on Medicare, the more likely they are to support the president’s bid for reelection.
A focus on Medicare as an issue also blunts potential fallout from Obama’s 2010 health-care reform law. The law remains controversial and is, according to an analysis of these new poll results, a drag on Obama’s reelection prospects. In Florida and Ohio, more voters have “strongly unfavorable” than “strongly favorable” impressions of the health law.
Sizable majorities of voters in each of these three states — as well as those across the country — say they prefer to keep Medicare as a defined benefits program, rather than moving to a system of fixed payments to seniors to buy coverage from private insurance or traditional Medicare. The “premium support” idea is one featured in the Republican budget proposed by Ryan and backed by Romney. The desire to keep the system as it is peaks at 65 percent in Florida, where more than one in five 2008 voters were age 65 and up.
Romney touts his health-care law, bashes Obama’s law
By Philip Rucker ,
TOLEDO — Over the course of a half hour on Wednesday evening, Mitt Romney put on a vivid display of his political flexibility on the lightning-rod issue of health care.
As his surrogates were warming up a crowd of 3,600 at the SeaGate Convention Centre in downtown Toledo, Romney sat backstage for an interview with NBC News, during which he fully embraced the health care overhaul he signed into law as governor of Massachusetts.
“Don’t forget,” Romney said, “I got everybody in my state insured. One hundred percent of the kids in our state had health insurance. I don’t think there’s anything that shows more empathy and care about the people of this country than that kind of record.”
As his surrogates were warming up a crowd of 3,600 at the SeaGate Convention Centre in downtown Toledo, Romney sat backstage for an interview with NBC News, during which he fully embraced the health care overhaul he signed into law as governor of Massachusetts.
“Don’t forget,” Romney said, “I got everybody in my state insured. One hundred percent of the kids in our state had health insurance. I don’t think there’s anything that shows more empathy and care about the people of this country than that kind of record.”
Then, just minutes later, Romney stepped out to rally his supporters here with a sharp critique of Obama’s national health-care overhaul, calling the federal law “Exhibit No. 1” of Obama’s liberal view of government, even though it is very similar to Romney’s own Massachusetts law.
“I will repeal Obamacare and replace it with real health care reform,” Romney said at the rally. “You see, Obamacare is really Exhibit No. 1 of the president’s political philosophy, and that is that government knows better than people how to run your lives. It is a view that government should stand between you and your doctor. I don’t believe in a bigger and bigger government…I believe in freedom.”
“I will repeal Obamacare and replace it with real health care reform,” Romney said at the rally. “You see, Obamacare is really Exhibit No. 1 of the president’s political philosophy, and that is that government knows better than people how to run your lives. It is a view that government should stand between you and your doctor. I don’t believe in a bigger and bigger government…I believe in freedom.”
Romney’s comments to NBC represented his strongest embrace of the Massachusetts law in some time, while his attack on Obama’s law at the rally was one of his toughest.
Maine Medical Center notifies state of $40M renovation project
Posted Sept. 26, 2012, at 3:58 p.m.
PORTLAND, Maine — Maine Medical Center has notified the state that it’s planning a $40 million expansion and update of several of the hospital’s operating rooms.
MMC plans to replace and modernize five surgical rooms to help the hospital accommodate surgeries that are increasing in volume and complexity, said Mark Harris, senior vice president of planning and marketing for MMC and its parent organization, MaineHealth.
“We’re pretty compressed with regard to our surgical capacity,” he said. “What I mean by that is we’re operating very early in the morning and very late at night. This will help decompress that activity.”
MMC performs approximately 28,000 surgeries each year in its 34 operating rooms.
Earlier this month, MMC notified the Maine Department of Health and Human Services’ Certificate of Need unit, which evaluates health care projects, that it planned to pursue the renovations. It’s an early step, which will be followed in coming months by MMC submitting a formal application after its board of directors approves final plans.
MMC expects to invest $40 million in capital into the project, but the board still must determine the effect on the hospital’s operating expenses, Harris said.
If the board’s review and regulatory approvals proceed without a hitch, construction would kick off next spring, Harris said. The project will involve renovating the second floor of the Bean building on MMC’s Bramhall Street campus and wouldn’t be visible from the street.
The existing operating rooms date back to 1984, and at about 400 square feet, aren’t large enough for many modern surgeries, Harris said. The new 650-square-foot rooms will be known as “interventional rooms” that can house not only surgeries, but other services as needed, such as radiology and cardiac catheterization, he said.
Plan Selection in Medicare Part D
Fewer than 10 percent of individuals enroll in what for them would be the most cost-effective plans.
In Plan Selection in Medicare Part D: Evidence from Administrative Data (NBER Working Paper No.18166), co-authors Florian Heiss, Adam Leive, Daniel McFadden, and Joachim Winter analyze data on medical claims in Medicare Part D drug insurance programs. They find that fewer than 10 percent of individuals enroll in what for them would be the most cost-effective plans. This is apparently because seniors pay more attention to their out-of-pocket premiums than to the overall benefits of the dozens of drug plans available to them. Equally significant, the researchers believe that how seniors decide whether to enroll in Medicare Part D, and what plans they select, is important not only for management of the Part D program, but also is indicative of how consumers behave in real-world decision situations with a complex, ambiguous structure and high stakes. The researchers add that their findings may yield predictions for how seniors will handle plan choices in the new general health insurance exchanges that will implement the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010.
No comments:
Post a Comment