Now that the broad outlines and many of the details of healthcare reform are in sight, pundits are fiercely debating whether it is going to help or hurt. I am not talking here about Republican talking heads and bloggers, who are reflexively opposed to any Democratic bill and offer no alternatives. I am referring to centrist and left-wing observers who are taking positions on the current...
Health Care Industry Archive
October 2009
While healthcare industry players continue to salivate over the prospect of millions of new patients with insurance, the unified House reform bill would also ding the healthcare and insurance companies to varying extents. The measure, designed to cover 36 million more Americans, would hit the insurance, drug and device sectors with new taxes and restrictions. Hospitals would lose some...
On the day that the House of Representatives‘ Democratic majority unveiled their unified healthcare reform bill, Grant Thornton LLP released results of a survey of healthcare financial executives that suggests that many hospitals and other provider organizations are preparing for increased business. But because most provisions of the House and the Senate bills won’t become effective...
While most of the debate over healthcare reform focuses on the public option, a giant elephant in the room-long-term care-continues to be largely ignored. Responsible for about 35 percent of Medicaid spending, and a huge burden on the states, long-term care costs are expected to rise sharply with the number of elderly people. Few people have long-term care insurance, although it has been...
It’s long been an open secret in the healthcare industry that the American Medical Association overstates the number of practicing physicians in the U.S. The main reason is that the AMA Masterfile, which compiles self-reported information from practitioners, includes a lot of retired doctors. Now the conjecture has been replaced by data in a study just published in the Journal of the...
The nation is starting to reconsider whether all of the services customarily covered by insurance really need to be included. Some plans, for example, now exclude services such as diabetes care, organ transplants and chemotherapy, which always used to be covered. The national reform legislation might include a lower level of benefits for “young invincibles” to encourage young people...
Have you seen the new American Medical Association ads supporting healthcare reform? I’m referring to the ones in which an AMA spokesman notes that certain regions of the country have only one or two health insurers and suggests that if they had more competition, health costs would come down. The ads also specifically support a public option. An innocent viewer might think that the AMA...
The current presumption in the halls of power is that if insurance markets were less consolidated, insurance would cost less. President Obama and Senate Democrats have cited this as a justification for the public option; and, when House and Senate committees voted recently to repeal the insurance companies’ antitrust exemption, they repeated the same mantra. In a previous post, I...
Insurers May Lose Antitrust Exemption - House and Senate committees have both voted to strip the insurance industry of the antitrust exemption it currently has under the provisions of a 1945 federal law. The Senate version of this measure would go further by repealing the McCarran-Ferguson Act, which bars the feds from interfering with state regulation of insurance. The legislators who voted...
The Democrats stubbed their toes in the U.S. Senate when a proposal to rescind scheduled cuts in doctors’ Medicare reimbursement was blocked by a bipartisan vote. What was particularly striking about this vote is that-except for Republican Senator Olympia Snowe’s vote for the Senate Finance Committee reform bill-this is the first time Democrats and Republicans have agreed on...
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- Comparison of Health Reform Bills Reveals Key issues
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- NEJM Roundtable on Health Cost Control Offers Insights
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- White House Puts Focus On Medicare and Medicaid Fraud
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