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Category Archives: Health Care

Republicans have pro-growth ideas – tax reform, health care, reining in red tape. – Video

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Republicans have pro-growth ideas - tax reform, health care, reining in red tape.
Congressman Kevin Brady appeared on C-SPAN #39;s Newsmakers with host Susan Swain and reporters Tim Alberta with National Journal and Erik Wasson with The Hill. ...

By: Rep Kevin Brady

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Republicans have pro-growth ideas - tax reform, health care, reining in red tape. - Video

Health Care Basics

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ORLANDO, Fla.

For many, signing up for health care hasn't been as easy as signing the Affordable Care Act into law, as President Barack Obama did in March 2010.

The commercials made it look simple, but frustrations, complications and aggravation were some of the early reactions to the healthcare.gov website.

Those people are very right on, said Rachel Steinberg, Director of Business Development for Orlando Health. I mean, I work in the industry and I see I have 132 options to buy insurance. It's extremely overwhelming.

Its also time consuming.

And yes, it takes a little bit of homework, Steinberg explained. "A lot of homework, hours, sometimes, of analyzing the options.

Rachel Steinberg's an expert. She helps businesses understand the Affordable Care Act in Florida.

I've heard other technology folks say its easier to keep track of your fantasy football team online than your health care expenses, which is kind of funny because health care is very important, she added.

Jason Altmire also is a health care expert. He was a Congressman when the Affordable Care Act passed.

I voted against the law, said Altmire, who now works for Florida Blue as its Senior Vice President for Public Policy, Government and Community Affairs.

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Health Care Basics

Steady Health Care Sign-Ups May Miss Goal of 6M

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The Obama administration said Tuesday it's making steady progress on health care sign-ups, but the White House needs something close to a miracle to meet its goal of enrolling 6 million people by the end of this month.

It could happen with a sustained surge in consumer demand and a foolproof website. But they're not seeing it yet, and time is running out.

The Department of Health and Human Services said more than 940,000 people signed up during February for private coverage under President Barack Obama's health care law, bringing total sign-ups to 4.2 million.

But with open enrollment ending March 31, that means to meet the goal, another 1.8 million people would have to sign up by the end of the month, an average of about 60,000 a day.

That's way above the daily averages for January and February, which have ranged between 33,000 and 34,000. The math seems to be going against the administration.

Officials expect the pace to pick up. The big question is whether it will be enough to make up for the technical troubles that paralyzed HealthCare.gov much of last fall and the continuing challenges for several state-sponsored websites.

The goal of 6 million sign-ups is itself a lower bar than was originally set. The Congressional Budget Office scaled back its original target of 7 million because of the federal website's computer problems. HealthCare.gov serves 36 states, while 14 states and Washington, D.C., are running their own sites.

The 943,000 enrolled in February fell short of the target of 1.27 million that HHS had initially set for the month.

And the cumulative total of 4.2 million sign-ups is just three-fourths of the 5.65 million that HHS originally projected would sign up by the end of February. Those estimates were contained in a Sept. 5, 2013 departmental memo to HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.

The numbers released Tuesday still don't say how many of those signing up were previously uninsured, which is the ultimate test of Obama's health care overhaul. And they don't say how many consumers have sealed the deal by paying their premiums.

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Steady Health Care Sign-Ups May Miss Goal of 6M

Ezekiel Emanuel on Reinventing American Health Care

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In the final month of open enrollment for the federal and state-run health care exchanges, one of the architects of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) has published a new book thatoffers an inside look at health care reform.

In Reinventing American Healthcare: How the Affordable Care Act Will Improve Our Terribly Complex, Blatantly Unjust, Outrageously Expensive, Grossly Inefficient, Error Prone System, Wharton health care management professor Ezekiel J. Emanuel, a special adviser on health care reform to the White House from 2009-2011, provides a history of the health care system, an examination of the ACA and an exploration of what the future holds for health care.

Recently, Hoag Levins, managing editor of digital publications at the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics (LDI) at the University of Pennsylvania, interviewed Emanuel for Knowledge@Wharton. In this discussion, Emanuel critiques the execution of the ACA, explains why many more changes will be needed and argues that ultimately, the ACA has been a big step in the right direction and is catalyzing positive change. (Read a review of Emanuels book on the LDI website.)

An edited transcript of the conversation follows.

Hoag Levins: The title of your book is Reinventing American Healthcare, and the subtitle is How the Affordable Care Act Will Improve Our Terribly Complex, Blatantly Unjust, Outrageously Expensive, Grossly Inefficient, Error Prone System. Were you at all concerned that the subtitle is too confrontational or absolute? Were you concerned that it might turn off some of the readers whom you would otherwise be able to influence?

Ezekiel Emanuel: I do think that the description there the complexity, the inefficiency, the expensive, error-prone system is well accepted. Before the Affordable Care Act, we did have the kind of system that was terribly expensive and inefficient. It had a lot of people uninsured. The Affordable Care Act is going to make a big dent in each one of those [issues,] and I make that argument in the book, although I should say the book is not just an argument about the Affordable Care Act. It tries to educate people about the health care system how various parties get paid, how insurance came about in the United States, all the efforts over a hundred years of trying to reform it, how the Affordable Care Act got passed and what is in the Affordable Care Act. Then I do make predictions about the future.

Levins: In the book, you take the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) to task. You talk about the tyranny of the CBO, and you say that although the CBO scores are objective and non-partisan, they are frequently wrong. You talk about the bias and how it can create real harm by [creating] roadblocks for important and worthy legislation, and you cite instances from three decades of wrong CBO estimates. How did the CBO scoring impede the ACA, and if there had not been CBO scoring, how would the ACA be different?

Emanuel: First of all, I also say that we need an umpire. I recognize that the role the CBO plays is absolutely essential. You have to have someone who is going to objectively assess a bill. But I also indicate, as you point out, that they have an institutional bias. They are always willing to, say, discount savings and assess higher costs than you might because if they are wrong if things do not cost as much or they save more than they anticipated they think there is no harm done to the system. Part of what I wanted to point out is that there is harm done to the system. [For] good ideas that might have saved, they say, No, it is really not going to save, or it is only going to save a little, or it might even cost. They may be wrong on that and inhibit a lot of good ideas from coming forward. I do cite three decades of cases from the 1980s, 1990s and the 2000s of major health care legislation where they simply have underestimated the savings that could be achieved.

The Part D Medicare drug benefit is an excellent example. Their cost estimate was 40% too high. That makes a very big difference in setting policy, especially when every politician is constantly asking, How does it score? which means, Does it save money? There are a lot of programs that we wanted to put in to the Affordable Care Act that didnt score or did not score as much as the CBO would say, and that means that when you are bargaining, you do not retain [those programs] for the bargain because you cannot get as much savings from them. I point out in the book that there are lots of [instances] where there is no precedence, so [the CBO] just guesses. Again, I did not want to fault them. I did want to just indicate how it creates a certain kind of mindset. Everyone thinks they have this model that really does predict the future. Well, they have a model. It does not predict the future terribly well, and to constantly be trying to guess what they are going to score [a program] inhibits a lot more creative policy thinking than we might otherwise get.

In a democracy, you cannot expect a perfect A+ bill. You are going to get compromises that policy makers would prefer not to be there.

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Ezekiel Emanuel on Reinventing American Health Care

2013 Fine Awards For Teamwork Excellence in Healthcare: Highmark AIS – Video

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2013 Fine Awards For Teamwork Excellence in Healthcare: Highmark AIS
Sponsored by The Fine Foundation and the Jewish Healthcare Foundation, the Fine Awards reinforce the critical role teamwork plays in health care. The theme o...

By: Pittsburgh Regional Health Initiative

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2013 Fine Awards For Teamwork Excellence in Healthcare: Highmark AIS - Video

Burn Unit Series – "Stretching, Scar Management, and Compression" (UI Health Care) – Video

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Burn Unit Series - "Stretching, Scar Management, and Compression" (UI Health Care)
Patient video education series for University of Iowa Health Care #39;s Burn Treatment Center. For more information, please call 319-356-2496 or visit http://www...

By: University of Iowa Health Care

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Burn Unit Series - "Stretching, Scar Management, and Compression" (UI Health Care) - Video

Amitabh Bachchan & Om Puri at The Inauguration of Surya Child Health Care Centre – Video

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Amitabh Bachchan Om Puri at The Inauguration of Surya Child Health Care Centre
Amitabh Bachchan Om Puri at The Inauguration of Surya Child Health Care Centre Visit - https://www.unitezz.com . India #39;s Biggest Bollywood Entertainment We...

By: Unitezz Media Official

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Amitabh Bachchan & Om Puri at The Inauguration of Surya Child Health Care Centre - Video

Campos wants stricter rules on S.F. health care accounts

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It looks like it's loophole closure time all over again.

Supervisor David Campos is once again proposing legislation to stop employers from pocketing millions of dollars that were supposed to pay for employee health care as part of the city's universal health care law.

The centerpiece of Campos' proposal is a requirement that money employers deposit in savings accounts to reimburse their workers for their health care expenses actually gets used for that. Now, employers may take back the unused portion of the money after two years, and some do.

In 2010, 860 employers put a total of $62.5 million into the accounts, paid out $12.4 million and kept the rest, officials reported.

Campos, who on Tuesday will ask the city attorney to draft this latest legislation, tried to close the loophole in 2011 by preventing employers from taking back money until 18 months after an employee had left the company. But after the Board of Supervisors approved his legislation, Mayor Ed Lee vetoed it amid concerns from businesses that said it would tie up millions of dollars and could force them to lay off workers or possibly close.

A draft report from the Office of Labor Standards Enforcement in July indicated that the situation had only improved somewhat.

The overall reimbursement rate to employees rose from 17 percent in 2011 to 25 percent in 2012, with actual payments jumping from $11.3 million to $26.4 million in 2012.

In 2011, 17 percent of employers who opted for the reimbursement accounts to comply with the city's Health Care Security Ordinance paid out absolutely nothing, the draft report said.

In 2012, after the loophole fix, 12 percent of employers with the accounts reported reimbursing nothing for employee health care, the report said.

With the city's economy humming amid growing frustration about income disparity, Campos may find a better reception at the Board of Supervisors for his legislation this time around and get eight votes to make it veto-proof.

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Campos wants stricter rules on S.F. health care accounts

Uninsured rate drops due to health care law, but signups lag among Hispanics

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A bodega worker receives free care during a health clinic in the Bronx in 2010. Photo by Chris Hondros/Getty Images

With just three weeks left to enroll on the new insurance exchanges, the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, finds that 15.9 percent of U.S. adults are uninsured thus far in 2014, down from 17.1 percent for the last three months or calendar quarter of 2013.

Released Monday, the survey based on more than 28,000 interviews is a major independent effort to track the health care rollout. The drop of 1.2 percentage points in the uninsured rate translates to about 3 million people gaining coverage.

Gallup said the proportion of Americans who are uninsured is on track to drop to the lowest quarterly level it measured since 2008, before Obama took office.

Its probably a reasonable hypothesis that the Affordable Care Act is having something to do with this drop, said Frank Newport, Gallups editor-in-chief. We saw a continuation of the trend we saw last month; it didnt bounce back up.

The survey found that almost every major demographic group made progress getting health insurance, although Hispanics lagged.

With the highest uninsured rate of any racial or ethnic group, Latinos were expected to be major beneficiaries of the new health care law. They are a relatively young population and many are on the lower rungs of the middle class, in jobs that dont come with health insurance. Theyve also gone big for Obama in his two presidential campaigns.

But the administrations outreach effort to Hispanics stumbled from the start. The Spanish-language enrollment website, CuidadodeSalud.gov, was delayed due to technical problems. Its name sounds like a clunky translation from English: Care of Health.

The feds also translated Affordable Care Act as Law for Care of Health at Low Price which doesnt sound too appealing.

A spot check of the Spanish site on Monday showed parts of it still use a mix of Spanish and English to convey information on such basics as insurance copays, risking confusion.

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Uninsured rate drops due to health care law, but signups lag among Hispanics


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