States. They’re just as perplexed as the rest of us over the ever-rising cost of health care premiums.
Now some states — including Montana, North Carolina and Oregon — are moving to control costs of state employee health plans. Their strategy: Use Medicare reimbursement rates to recalibrate how they pay hospitals. If the gamble pays off, more private-sector employers could start doing the same thing.
“Government workers will get it first, then everyone else will see the savings and demand it,” says Glenn Melnick, a hospital finance expert and professor at the University of Southern California. “This is the camel’s nose. It will just grow and grow.”
The American people – and just about all our elected officials – frequently and justifiably complain about the high cost of health care. But unless Congress acts, a tax increase on medical devices will take effect Jan. 1 and needlessly raise those costs even higher.
The 2.3 percent tax on medical devices was signed into law by President Obama and took effect in 2013. Fortunately, Congress passed legislation in 2015 and again in 2017 to temporarily suspend the tax. However, without further congressional action the tax will kick back in at the beginning of 2020.
New Jersey Senator Cory Booker claims Medicare for All would “save lives.” Vermont’s own Senator Bernie Sanders promises it would end “the disgrace of tens of thousands of Americans dying every year from preventable deaths.”
But a new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research finds little evidence to support those assertions. The authors examined people who gained government health coverage in recent years and found no “statistically significant pattern of results consistent with . . . mortality changes.”
Recently, I chaired a discussion at CPAC on the importance of choice in health care, and specifically health care coverage. My fellow panelists talked about government rule-making, Medicare waivers and the many problems that approaches like “Medicare for All” create — such as interposing Uncle Sam between physicians and patients. All important aspects of the health care puzzle — but nothing that hasn’t been turned over more than once in a wonky world of $5 words and inside the Beltway policy chatter.
The Trump administration slammed “Medicare for All” in its annual economic review Tuesday, claiming thatcreating a new government-run health care program would be expensive, damage the economy and hurt Americans’ health.President Donald Trump and his top health officials have repeatedly blasted Medicare for All, which several Democratic presidential candidates and lawmakers are backing.”M4A will be neither more efficient nor cheaper than the current system, and it could adversely affect health,” said the report, which is prepared by the White House Council of Economic Advisers, using a shorthand acronym for the proposed reform.
A House panel on Wednesday sent the latest Medicaid expansion bill in the Idaho Legislature on to the House floor, but without a recommendation to pass it.
The bill — from Nampa Republican Rep. John Vander Woude — includes controversial provisions, such as a work requirement. It also requires people who are just above the poverty line to buy private health insurance plans from Idaho’s insurance exchange.
Obamacare health plans have been criticized for severely restricting the doctors and hospitals that patients can see. But sometimes even those limited provider lists are riddled with errors, causing additional headaches for patients who had purchased a plan hoping to keep their physician only to later discover that doctor isn’t fully covered by insurance.
Marketplace insurers are fighting lawsuits from consumers in four different states who say they were misled about which health providers were covered under their plan. It wasn’t until after purchasing the plan, these patients allege, that they learned their doctor or hospital was outside its network and therefore covered only partially or not at all.
As House Democrats sit down to draft their vision of governance in the coming weeks, lawmakers find themselves badly divided.
Centrists from swing districts, with the tacit support of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, favor incremental moves to shore up the Affordable Care Act and to lower the out-of-pocket costs of prescription drugs and medical care. They are pushing a variety of measures, such as shutting down cheap, short-term insurance plans that do not cover pre-existing medical conditions and allowing people to buy into Medicare at age 50 or 55.
But they are butting up against an aggressive and expanding group of more than 100 outspoken Democrats — as well as at least four of the party’s presidential candidates — who want to upend the whole system with a single government insurance plan for all Americans — the old concept of single payer, now called Medicare for all.
Federal regulators Friday approved Ohio’s request to require thousands of Medicaid recipients to work, attend classes or train for a job to qualify for benefits.
The federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services notified state officials that they could impose work requirements on able-bodied adults up to age 50 enrolled in the tax-funded health insurance program.
Ohio is the 9th state to get permission to mandate work for certain Medicaid beneficiaries. So far, only Arkansas, Indiana and New Hampshire have implemented the requirement.
Legal challenges aren’t slowing down the Trump administration’s push to reframe Medicaid as something closer to a welfare program.
Driving the news: The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services on Friday approved Ohio’s proposal to add work requirements to its Medicaid program.
- Just a day earlier, Justice Department lawyers were back before the same federal judge who ruled against work requirements last year, urging him to let the policy move forward now.