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Thinking about health insurance? Call to learn your options! 877-702-6045 HealthCompare

Higher quality at a lower cost. That’s the vision for the future of health care, and that’s a big reason why Catholic Healthcare West, Hill Physicians and Blue Shield of California have teamed up again to form an accountable care organization (ACO), this time in San Francisco. (Last year, our three organizations built one of the first ACOs in the nation, which improved quality and reduced costs for Sacramento-area CalPERS members.)

There’s been a lot of talk about the promise of ACOs, but what do they mean for patients in real life? Perhaps the most noticeable difference is in the experience of entering and leaving a hospital. In this model, when someone is admitted to the hospital, an integrated process looks ahead. Follow-up appointments are scheduled even before the patient is discharged, and all clinical notes from the hospitalization are sent to the member’s primary-care doctor ahead of that follow-up visit.

As a result, patients have higher confidence in their care instructions, receive prompt follow-up medical care and are less likely to be readmitted for avoidable complications.

Thinking about health insurance? Call to learn your options! 877-702-6045 HealthCompare

Thinking about health insurance? Call to learn your options! 877-702-6045 HealthCompare

President Obama announced this week his support for legislation that would give states more flexibility in meeting the objectives of his signature health-care reform. He said that this change would give states freedom to innovate and act as “laboratories of our democracy.”

This use of states as “laboratories” makes sense to anyone who has considered the massive challenge of reforming health care in America. Centralized control of an industry that affects all 309 million Americans, has revenues of over $2.3 trillion annually, and employs more than 14 million people is not possible. Given the tremendous diversity of our population, any one-size-fits-all approach is destined to fail.

In many areas, states can be more effective regulators than the federal government. Which transportation system works more efficiently — your state highway system or Amtrak? Would your state university get better results if it were run by the Department of Education? Who is more responsive — your local sheriff’s office or the TSA crew at the airport? Which has shown itself to be better at managing risk — life-insurance companies (which are regulated by the states) or Wall Street?

Furthermore, state officials serve smaller areas, live in the areas they serve, and are more accountable to their citizens than their counterparts in Washington, D.C. Constituents feel they have stronger connections and more influence with state and local officials than they do with their representatives in Congress.

In order to effect real change, the president should support the idea of states’ assuming the primary authority and responsibility for health care. In other words, he should support the Health Care Compact.

A growing number of states are uniting around the Health Care Compact, which would give states both the primary responsibility for health-care regulation and full control over federal taxes spent on health care within their borders.

The Health Care Compact is a governance reform, not a health-care-policy reform. It would change who decides health-care policy, not who or what is covered. The Health Care Compact is needed because no centrally planned, top-down reform can fix health care throughout the United States. Instead, each state should craft its health-care policies to fit its specific needs. Some states may choose a single-payer system, while others may opt for a health-savings-account system with subsidies for seniors and low-income residents. Under the Health Care Compact, each state decides which plan is best for its citizens.

Citizens and state legislators in more than eleven states are working to get the Health Care Compact passed by their legislatures, and the compact is being actively discussed in at least 25 other states.

The interstate compact is not a radical idea. Compacts are simply voluntary agreements between two or more states, and when consented to by Congress, they have the force of federal law. Compacts have been used throughout America’s history, even before we adopted the Constitution. Authority for compacts was established in the Constitution (Article I, Section 10), and more than 200 such agreements have been developed.

President Obama’s decision to ease the opt-out requirements is a small step in the right direction, but it falls far short of restoring citizen control over health care, and fiscal sanity to Washington. The Health Care Compact offers a choice to the president and Congress. They can continue their partisan bickering over federal health-care reform, or they can embrace an approach that is more likely to succeed, one that brings control closer to the people by putting states in charge of health-care dollars and policies.

Thinking about health insurance? Call to learn your options! 877-702-6045 HealthCompare

Thinking about health insurance? Call to learn your options!

877-702-6045 HealthCompare

It makes sense when you think about it. If something is going to cost more, you might take steps to avoid paying for it if it’s not incredibly vital at the moment. According to a story in Mediapage Today entitled, “High-Deductible Health Insurance Results in Less Care,” that’s exactly what’s happening with many low-income families enrolled in high deductible plans. Regardless of income, one half of families enrolled in high deductible plans have avoided receiving a medical service due to its cost.

These plans are attractive due to their lower monthly premiums, and while proponents of these plans like the fact that they help people avoid getting costly medical procedures that might be unnecessary, the flip side of the coin is that many lower-income people aren’t simply avoiding medical procedures, they flat-out can’t afford them. In recent studies, it was shown that lower-income families were 300% more likely to skip even recommended medical procedures than higher-income families due to the costs of the procedure. The study also found that lower-income families in high deductible plans are less apt to talk to their doctor about a medical problem.

Will the Affordable Care Act help with this? It’s hoped so, by bringing more people into the health insurance pool in order to lessen the costs of insurance. While it’s questioned how much this will help skyrocketing medical costs, many see it as a step in the right direction.

Thinking about health insurance? Call to learn your options!

877-702-6045 HealthCompare

Thinking about health insurance? Call to learn your options!

877-702-6045 HealthCompare

A lot of health insurance companies have been in the news due to their hikes in health insurance premiums. More and more often, many companies are pointing the blame elsewhere, including losing customers and even the recently passed Affordable Care Act. Well, according to an article from NPR entitled, “Health Law Hardly At Fault For Rising Premiums,” health insurance companies can’t really blame the recent law as a reason to raise premiums.

The article cites several examples from small business owners in which their health insurance brokers blamed health insurance reform for the rising costs of premiums. Jay Angoff, head of the Office of Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, says “It would be inaccurate and silly to blame it on the new law. To the extent that the insurance companies blame the new law for rate increases, they know better,” Angoff says. He goes onto say that the new law would only raise rates between one and two percent.

Last month, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius wrote a letter to the health insurance industry warning them about “falsely blaming premium increases for 2011 on the patient protections in the Affordable Care Act”. However, Robert Zirkelbach of the insurance industry trade group America’s Health Insurance Plans says that some part of the rate increases can be attributed to the new law, some portions of which just took effect. The article then goes onto list more likely culprits of the increases, like healthy people cutting coverage due to a weakened economy, among other things. Overall, however, opinions are still mixed as to how much savings we’ll see from the health reform laws.

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