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Mal Allison

The Health Care Law Guru vs. the Conservative who Inspired It | The Business Desk with ... - 0 views

www.pbs.org/...uru-of-obamacare-vs-the-c.html

ACA individual Market Gruber

shared by Mal Allison on 02 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • "Fine. A big group, we can understand the overall risk. We can model that. We're happy. But individuals, we're not so sure, and that's why the individual insurance market, which is a market where Americans who don't get insurance from their employer or the government have to turn, that's why that market is so screwed up all around the country and why we needed the Affordable Care Act.
  • First, it was not primarily intended to push people to obtain protection for their own good, but to protect others. Like auto damage liability insurance required in most states, our requirement focused on "catastrophic" costs -- so hospitals and taxpayers would not have to foot the bill for the expensive illness or accident of someone who did not buy insurance.
  • Mal Allison on 02 Oct 13
     
    We can model that. We're happy. But individuals, we're not so sure, and that's why the individual insurance market, which is a market where Americans who don't get insurance from their employer or the government have to turn, that's why that market is so screwed up all around the country and why we needed the Affordable Care Act.
Mal Allison

Bare Bones Health Plans Expected To Survive Health Law - Kaiser Health News - 0 views

www.kaiserhealthnews.org/...alth-insurance-health-law.aspx

bare bones health plans mini med ACA

shared by Mal Allison on 26 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • Proposed and final rules issued this spring surprised many by failing to bar large employers from offering insurance policies that could exclude benefits such as hospitalization. Offering bare-bones policies may result in some fines, but that expense could be less than the cost of offering traditional medical coverage. For large employers, "the feds imposed no minimum standard on how skimpy that coverage can be other than to say, in essence, it's got to be more robust than a dental plan or a vision plan," said Ed Fensholt, a senior vice president at insurance broker Lockton Companies. "We had customers looking at offering some relatively inexpensive and skimpy plan designs to satisfy the individual mandate at modest cost.”
  • The bare-bones plans cannot be offered to small businesses with fewer than 50 workers, or to individuals buying coverage through new online marketplaces that open for enrollment Oct. 1. But benefit experts expect some larger firms that buy outside the marketplaces or that self-insure to consider them. 
  • Skimpy insurance under the Affordable Care Act won’t be quite the same as it is now. Under the new rules, capping the dollar value of annual benefits isn't allowed, but excluding entire categories from coverage - such as hospital stays - is permitted, say benefit consultants. That's another way of keeping costs down.
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  • he law says only that large-employer policies must cover preventive care such as blood pressure tests or vaccines with no co-pays for consumers. So the plan could cover dental, vision and preventive cancer screenings, but possibly not the treatment or hospital care a patient could need if diagnosed with an illness.
  • rue, the health act requires policies to include coverage for 10 broad categories of “essential health benefits,” such as hospitalization and mental health services, but that provision applies only to plans sold to small businesses and individuals.  Larger firms and self-insured employers are exempt.
  • .” Employers offering these sorts of plans do face some risks, experts said. If a large employer doesn’t offer “minimum essential coverage,” it’s potentially liable for fines of $2,000 per full-time worker after the first 30 workers.
  • they must pay $3,000 for each worker who receives subsidies to buy coverage.
Mal Allison

Fact vs. Fiction: Arkansas' Game-Changing Medicaid Expansion Plan - 0 views

www.governing.com/...g-medicaid-expansion-plan.html

arkansas medicaid expansion facts

shared by Mal Allison on 16 Jul 13 - No Cached
  • A: That’s true. Or that’s a prediction that I believe will be proven true, I should say. Here’s the explanation. The standard theory on making insurance markets is that you want its competition to be continuous. The way to do that is to see that the risk pool of covered lives is a large, stable and ideally relatively health population. I cannot think of a larger, more stable and relatively healthy population, in proportion to the rest of the exchange population, than the Medicaid expansion population. They are systemically younger than the rest of the population. That’s one of the reasons that they're poorer. Our program design is also going to pull out the highest-risk people from the private option and treat them in the traditional Medicaid program because we would have had to supplement for many of their services. (Editor's note: Federal law requires Medicaid premium assistance to 'wraparound' to make sure recipients get the same amount of coverage through private insurance as they would in Medicaid). That’s very hard to do. It’s both care and administratively burdensome. Those individuals, the highest five to 10 percent costly individuals, would be better served in a single program, and by definition that would have to be the traditional Medicaid program.
Mal Allison

Some Say Obamacare's 'Affordable' Coverage Isn't Affordable For Them - Kaiser Health News - 0 views

www.kaiserhealthnews.org/...rdability-insurance-costs.aspx

ACA affordablemoderate income

shared by Mal Allison on 25 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • After that level, the law caps out-of-pocket payments to a maximum of $6,350 annually for an individual, or $12,700 for a family.
  • For La Voie, who makes less than 200 percent of the federal poverty level, the law caps out-of-pocket costs at $2,250 for individuals.
Mal Allison

Economist: Medicaid expansion a rural issue | Green Bay Press Gazette | greenbaypressga... - 0 views

www.greenbaypressgazette.com/...Medicaid-expansion-rural-issue

economist medicaid expansion rural

shared by Mal Allison on 03 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • Ryan White, a hospital consultant with Eide Bailly LLP, said one concern is that more people who buy private insurance, including through the online exchanges being set up by the federal government and some states, could opt for plans with high deductibles. He said the lowest-cost plans offered through the exchanges could have deductibles as high as $7,000. That creates a problem if they get sick.“A lot of the individuals signing up for those plans probably don’t have $7,000 sitting in a bank account to pay general hospital of Milwaukee,” White said.
Mal Allison

Massachusetts companies weigh trimming employee benefits in response to federal health ... - 0 views

www.bostonglobe.com/...story.html

massachusetts companies employee benefits health law ACA

shared by Mal Allison on 02 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • Delta Airlines has reduced the generous health benefits offered to its pilots in order to avoid a new federal tax on costly health plans, known as the “Cadillac tax.” Starting in 2018, most employers must pay a 40 percent excise tax on the amount that premiums for a health plan exceed $10,200 for an individual and $27,500 for a family. “Given enough years, all plans will eventually risk being subject to the Cadillac tax and as they do, the natural reaction will be to continually reduce benefits provided,” wrote a Delta executive in a memo.
Mal Allison

Growth in Income and Health Care Costs | The Doctor Weighs In - 0 views

www.thedoctorweighsin.com/n-income-and-health-care-costs

growth income health care costs middle class

shared by Mal Allison on 04 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • Consider the period from 1980 to 2011. Cash income per member of a median income household, which includes items like wages and interest and cash payments from government like Social Security, only grew by about $4,300 or 27 percent over that period, when adjusted for inflation. From 2000 to 2010, it was even negative. Yet according to data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, per capita personal income—our most comprehensive measure of individual income—grew 72 percent from 1980 to 2011.
Mal Allison

Frustrated by Healthcare.gov, some consumers buy off exchange | Reuters - 0 views

www.reuters.com/...insurers-idUSL1N0IC0PN20131025

off exchange health plans

shared by Mal Allison on 22 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • More often than not, those plans are individual policies that are not available on the government-run exchange.
Mal Allison

HEALTH REFORM: Expect Pluses, Minuses for Those With Job-Based Coverage - iVillage - 0 views

www.ivillage.com/...4-a-547763

ACA employer-based insurance

shared by Mal Allison on 01 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Beginning in 2014, for instance, the reform package prohibits employer-sponsored health plans from excluding people from coverage based on pre-existing health conditions
  • It also makes larger employers responsible for offering medical coverage. Beginning Jan. 1, 2015, businesses with more than 50 workers must offer health insurance to full-time workers and dependents or pay penalties.
  • annual limits will be banned completely in 2014.
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  • Also, if you have an adult child under age 26 and your employer health plan offers coverage for dependents, the plan must allow your son or daughter to enroll. Spiro called th
  • The law also requires most employer health plans to offer certain preventive services at no cost to the employee.
  • Effective Jan. 1, 2014, the law allows employers to boost rewards and penalties (such as premium discounts or surcharges) to 30 percent of the total plan premium, up from 20 percent.
  • ne in five employers has boosted employees' share of health plan premiums,
  • HealthCare Advocates, which helps consumers resolve health insurance problems. "I think at the end of the day, everybody's going to be paying more," he said.
  • e IFEBP survey also estimates that about 16 percent of employers are trimming worker hours to part-time status so fewer employees will qualify for health-plan benefits.
  • Beginning in 2015, large employers -- those with at least 50 full-time workers -- must provide health insurance to employees who log an average of 30 or more hours a week or pay penalties.
  • A study published earlier this year by the University of California, Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education found that 2.3 million workers nationwide -- particularly retail and restaurant workers -- are at risk of losing hours as a result of the new law.
  • A growing number of midsize and large employers -- 25 percent in 2014 and 44 percent in 2015 -- are also saying they're likely to discontinue health coverage for Medicare-eligible retirees, a new Towers Watson & Co. survey found.
  • Starting in 2018, the law imposes a steep tax on employer plans with premiums exceeding $10,200 for an individual and $27,500 for a family -- plans that are typically offered to high-wage earner
  • About 17 percent of employers are redesigning their high-cost plans to avoid this so-called "Cadillac tax," while 40 percent are considering i
  • The percentage of Americans receiving health insurance on the job or through a family member's job slipped from 69.7 percent in 2000 to 59.5 percent in 2011,
  • Staggering increases in health insurance premiums also contributed to the decline, resulting in fewer employers offering coverage and fewer employees accepting it.
  • Congressional Budget Office estimates suggest that as many as 7 million people will lose job-based coverage by 2017 a
  • But just 26 percent are confident that they will be offering health-care benefits a decade from no
  • r Center, has summarized provisions of the Affordable Care Act affecting employer-sponsored insurance.
  • To read part one of the series, how to navigate the new health insurance exchanges, click here.
  • Mal Allison on 01 Oct 13
     
    Experts say smaller companies that employ 50 or more workers and currently provide health insurance may drop coverage because it would be cheaper to pay fines than maintain coverage for all of their workers. Most large employers (with more than 1,000 employees) remain committed to providing health benefits for the next five years, according to an employer survey by Towers Watson/National Business Group on Health. But just 26 percent are confident that they will be offering health-care benefits a decade from now. Meanwhile, a number of large employers are eyeing private health insurance exchanges as a way to continue providing job-based coverage while controlling spending on health benefits. Much like the public exchanges under the Affordable Care Act, private exchanges represent a new way for employees and families to shop for group health coverage and other benefits. Instead of offering a limited number of health plans, the employer would give workers a set amount of money to buy their own coverage. Kaiser, who works in Gallagher Benefit Services' Mount Laurel, N.J., office, anticipates a slow migration toward private exchanges. "I don't think it's going to be a mass disruption of employer-sponsored plans where they all go, 'I'm out of the game,'" he said. More information The University of California, Berkeley Labor Center, has summarized provisions of the Affordable Care Act affecting employer-sponsored insurance.
Mal Allison

Companies shift more health costs onto workers | The Tennessean | tennessean.com - 0 views

www.tennessean.com/...BUSINESS

companies shift health costs workers

shared by Mal Allison on 04 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Health insurance costs ate 7.7 percent of total payroll expenses for private-sector employers in 2012, according to the NIHM study.
  • n 2013, individuals paid, on average, $5,900 in total annual premiums for employer-sponsored coverage. On average, family plans cost more than $16,300. “With employees’ costs for medical coverage growing much more quickly than general inflation, hourly earnings and family income, some workers are inevitably (being) priced out of coverage,” the study said.
  • 2018, 40 million American employees will be enrolled in private exchanges
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