Our Health Policy Matters

Obamacare may already be making private health insurers more efficient, according to a year-over-year comparison of data related to the biggest consumer protection in the law. Last year, insurers had to rebate $1.1 billion to consumers because they failed to meet the minimum payout percentage required by the law .  That was the first year the payout provision, or mandatory minimum loss ratio, was in effect. This year, the federal government has announced that the rebate will be just half that – slightly more than $504 million. And the number of consumers who receive a rebate will also be smaller.  Last year, 12.7 million customers received rebates.  This year, the number receiving rebates has dropped by one-third, to 8.5 million. Why are fewer and smaller rebates a good thing? According to the Department of Health and Human Services, this is evidence that insurers are “ spending more of their premium dollars directly toward patient care and quality, not red tap

Last week, I wrote about the states that have decided not to expand Medicaid this year.  The decision will cost them in money and lives.  But the 24 (and counting) states that have chosen to expand Medicaid will face challenges of their own.  As a new article in Health Affairs Blog reveals, expanding states will have plenty to do to assure that the benefits of expansion reach those most in need. The article, entitled Lessons of Early Medicaid Expansions Under the Affordable Care Act , reviews the experiences of five states and the District of Columbia in expanding Medicaid benefits to additional populations using authority granted to them under Obamacare.  The five states were Connecticut, California, Minnesota, New Jersey, and Washington. All of the states were able to capture federal dollars to support state or local low-income insurance programs.  But, according to the authors, there were seven lessons these states learned that could be warning signs to other states

In the aftermath of the decisions by state governors and legislators not to expand Medicaid, the grim numbers are beginning to roll in.  Failure to expand Medicaid will cost states more than 19,000 lives and over a billion dollars per year. And that, sadly, is only the beginning. Source: RAND Analysis, Health Affairs, June 2013 I wrote about this prospect earlier this year, when I concluded that as many as 36,000 lives could hang in the balance of the Medicaid expansion debate. Now we have some new numbers from a RAND Corporation analysis, published this month by Health Affairs , which quantified the impact of failing to expand Medicaid in fourteen states (as of April 2013) where governors opposed the expansion.  The fourteen states were Alabama, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Louisiana, Maine, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, and Wisconsin. It found that in 2016 there would be 3.6 million fewer insured people in th

The 2013 Medicare Trustees report is out, and it proves once again that the so-called Medicare funding crisis is a myth that has been manufactured by political leaders more interested in cutting the size of government than in assuring access to health care for all. Those may seem like strong words, but we have been waiting for a long time for government leaders to tell us the truth about Medicare.  That it hasn’t contributed to our budget deficit.  That its trust fund is solvent.  And, most important, that it would take only the tiniest of tax increases to preserve Medicare as we know it for everyone who is alive today. The 2013 report was released last week.  Nearly one in every six (or 50.7 million) Americans is covered by Medicare.  42 million of them are age 65 and over, but 8.5 million are younger and living with serious disabilities. The combined Medicare expenditures – for parts A, B, and D – were $574 billion in 2012.  Taxes, co-pays, and other income produ