Tag: "health insurance"

Premiums For Employer-Based Family Health Insurance Up One Fifth Since Obamacare

The Kaiser Family Foundation/Health Research Educational Trust has released its 2016 Employer Health Benefits Survey. The survey covers almost 1,900 private and public (non-federal) employers. The results show Obamacare has not reduced premiums, which have increased by one fifth for family plans since 2011.

The good news is the proportion of beneficiaries with “High-Deductible Health Plans with a Savings Option” (HDHP/SOs) has increased from 20 percent to 29 percent in two years. Only four percent of covered worker were in such plans in 2006, and 17 percent in 2011. (In 2015, a HDHP had to have a minimum deductible of $1,300 for single coverage and $2,600 for family. The “Savings Option” would be a Health Savings Account or Health Reimbursement Arrangement.)

These plans were first available in 2005, and correspond with an immediate slowdown in the rate of growth of employer-based benefits. In real terms (adjusted for changes in the Consumer Price Index), dropped from double digits in the early 2000s to single digits after 2005 and bottoming out at an increase in premium of just two percent in 2009. There was an immediate jump of 11 percent in 2011, Obamacare’s first year. Since then, both High Deductible Health Plans and the burden of Obamacare have continued to grow. This struggle has resulted in mid-single digit premium growth.

See Figure I below the fold:

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Sep 23, 2016 | 10 comments | by

More Than One In Five Americans “Churn” Through Health Coverage Within A Year

Census2The U.S. Census Bureau has just released the Current Population Report’s Health Insurance Coverage in The United States, 2015. This report sits alongside the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Health Interview Survey as a critical source of understanding changes in health insurance in recent years.

The report discusses coverage during the three years from 2013 through 2015, so it does not reveal the large increase in employer-based coverage since the great recession. During this shorter period, there was an insignificant gain in employer-based coverage, and a large increase in persons dependent on Medicaid, the joint state-federal welfare program that provides health benefits to low-income residents. The number of people dependent on Medicaid for at least part of the year increased from 55 million in 2013 to 62 million in 2015. (Almost the entire increase took place in 2014, Obamacare’s first year of implementation.)

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Sep 20, 2016 | 9 comments | by

Obamacare Koan: What Is A Health Insurance Market Where No Insurance Is Offered?

Obamacare-protest-AP(A version of this Health Alert was published by Investors Business Daily.)

Obamacare appears to be in a death spiral, with a shrinking pool of insurers offering coverage, far fewer individuals purchasing insurance than advocates had anticipated, and double-digit price increases making policies unaffordable — not only to many individuals and families, but to taxpayers, who are required to underwrite the hefty subsidies Washington promised.

The law is not working and its condition is getting worse. The centerpiece of the program, the health insurance exchanges (misleadingly labeled “Marketplaces” by the administration), will pretty much cease to exist within a few more years.

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Sep 14, 2016 | 35 comments | by

Recent Rise In Health Coverage Due To Return of Jobs With Benefits

NHIS(A version of this Health Alert was published by Forbes.)

The best measurement of people who lack health insurance, the National Health Interview Survey published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), has released early estimates of health insurance for all fifty states and the District of Columbia in the first quarter of 2016. There are three things to note.

First: 70.2 percent of residents, age 18 to through 64, had “private health insurance” (at the time of the interview) in the first quarter of this year, which is which is the same rate as persisted until 2006. Obamacare has not achieved a breakthrough in coverage. It has just restored us to where we were a decade ago. Further, the contribution of Obamacare’s exchanges to this is almost trivial, covering only four million people.

What has really happened is a restoration of employer-based benefits as we have slowly clawed our way out of recession: 61.2 million people had non-exchange private insurance in Q1 2010. This included both employer-based benefits and the pre-Obamacare market for individual health insurance. By Q1 2016, this had increased to 66 million. Because most in the pre-Obamacare individual market have shifted into Obamacare exchange coverage, the increase in employer-based coverage will have been close to eight or nine million.

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Sep 09, 2016 | 24 comments | by

Brookings: The Unaffordable Care Act Lowered Individual Premiums

Significant premium hikes in the Obamacare exchanges have been in the news lately. A Dallas Morning News article recently proclaimed, ‘When your health insurance is bigger than the mortgage, something’s wrong’. Indeed, insurers are charging premiums that about the size of a car payment on a late model used car. For a family the premiums are sometimes as high as a mortgage payment. Yet, insurers are hemorrhaging money – suffering losses to the tune of billions since Obamacare went into effect.

But apparently my perception is dead wrong. A pair of Brookings scholars argue individual premiums are actually lower than they would have been absent the Affordable Care Act. What???

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Jul 28, 2016 | 25 comments | by

Health Insurers, Hospitals Cannot Figure Out How To Pay For Catastrophic Care

Physician and Nurse Pushing GurneyAn advocate of consumer-driven health care, who makes the case that individuals should control most of our health spending directly, will not get very far before hearing the rebuttal: “When you have a heart attack or get hit by a bus, you won’t be in any condition to negotiate which hospital you go to.”

Fair enough, which is why we advocate insurance for catastrophic events, just like for houses or automobiles. However, in the current system, insurers and hospitals are dropping the ball on even that:

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Jul 22, 2016 | 32 comments | by

Weakening Business Case For Health Insurance

BoeingBoeing, the giant aerospace concern which is celebrating its centennial this year, has been cutting out the middle-man for health benefits:

In another sign of growing frustration with rising health costs, aerospace giant Boeing Co. has agreed to contract directly for employee benefits with a major health system in Southern California, bypassing the conventional insurance model.

The move, announced Tuesday, marks the expansion of Boeing’s direct-contracting approach, which it has already implemented in recent years in Seattle, St. Louis and Charleston, S.C.

In other examples, Intel Corp. contracted directly with a major health system in New Mexico, where it has several thousand employees.

Retailers Wal-Mart and Lowe’s took a different approach, striking deals with select hospitals across the country for bundled prices on specific surgeries. The companies steer workers to those hospitals.

(Chad Terhune, “Boeing Contracts Directly With California Health System for Employee Benefits,” Kaiser Health News, June 21, 2016)

I recently discussed evidence that insurers inflate rather than decrease prices for medical goods and services.

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Jul 19, 2016 | 40 comments | by

A Bipartisan “Yes” On A Health Care Tax Credit

health-insurance(A version of this Health Alert was published by RealClearHealth.)

Ready for some good news on health reform? Both the presumptive Democratic candidate for President and the Republican majority in the U.S. House of Representatives agree people should be able to spend more money directly on medical care without insurance companies meddling.

Both sides would be shocked to have their respective health reforms described as sharing any common ground. However, identifying this common ground might be necessary if either side wants to fix the worst aspects of Obamacare.

If Republican politicians in Congress want to give people any relief from the burden of Obamacare, they need to be prepared for the possibility they will have to deal with Hillary Clinton’s White House next year.

Speaker Ryan’s recently released Better Way health reform plan would offer a refundable tax credit for health care, to anyone who does not have employer-based health benefits. This tax credit would increase with age, but be available regardless of income. It would be a fixed-dollar amount for each age bracket. This is superior to Obamacare for at least two reasons.

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Jul 13, 2016 | 30 comments | by

More Evidence Against Health Insurance

doctor-mom-and-sonDavid Lazarus of the Los Angeles Times, whose columns on health policy tilt heavily towards single-payer advocacy, has done a great service to the cause of consumer-driven health care, describing how much more sense it makes to pay cash prices for health services than pay what your health insurer “negotiates.”

Five blood tests were performed in March at Torrance Memorial Medical Center. The hospital charged the patient’s insurer, Blue Shield of California, $408. The patient was responsible for paying $269.42.

Tests that were billed to Blue Shield at a rate of about $80 each carried a cash price of closer to $15 apiece.

This is one of the dirty little secrets of healthcare,” said Gerald Kominski, director of the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research. “If your insurance has a high deductible, you should always ask the cash price.”

Not all medical facilities will be open to sharing their cash prices with an insured person, Kominski said, but many will.

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Jul 06, 2016 | 44 comments | by

Is It Now Okay to Sell Your Kidney in the U.S.?

man-in-wheelchairThere is a global shortage of many organs for transplantation. How about just increasing the supply of organs through a free market? The idea of allowing people to sell their organs for personal gain grosses many of us out. Although, it is legal to sell our plasma, and many poor Americans find it profitable to do so.

The moral case for a market in organs has been made by Professors Kathryn Shelton and Richard B. McKenzie at the Library of Economics & Liberty. Yet, it is illegal to sell your organ for transplantation in the U.S. Or is it? A major insurer may have found a side door into this market, by offering up to $5,000 to kidney donors to cover their travel expenses. Clever, eh?

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Jul 05, 2016 | 4 comments | by
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