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Health Reform Bill Moves to Senate Floor
A long-awaited sign of progress for consumer-focused health care reform, Senator Max Baucus’ bill, America’s Healthy Future Act, passed the Senate Finance Committee 14 to 9 and moves on to the Senate floor. The bill not only promises to cut costs – the Congressional Budget Office calculated earlier that the bill would cost $829 billion, far lower than the target, and estimated it will reduce the federal deficit by $81 billion in its first 10 years, and $450 to $900 billion in its next ten years – but it plans to make health care more accessible to all, and create transparency in the insurance market.
“The bill we passed today puts patients and doctors – not insurance companies – in the driver’s seat,” said Baucus.
While the bill aims to reform the health care industry on all levels, the goals most crucial to the consumer are in cutting costs and provision of care, which all other areas of the bill essentially spring from, as well. There has been much dispute regarding many areas of this bill. Below are the key points that must be understood by the consumer in understanding the changes this bill hopes to make and how those changes will work together to create a more humanistic and efficient health care system.
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Health Insurance Exchange: the Pivotal Factor to Reform Success
Beyond the heated, emotional debate over the public option, the foundation of health care reform does not lie in creating a universal, federal health care giant. The most significant difference, the one that would make the main shift in the health care industry to becoming patient-centered under the current proposed bills, is the exchange.
The solution offered by Senator Baucus’ and President Obama’s plans is “managed competition,” or the health insurance exchange, a flexible outline for an entity that moderates insurers and offers a variety of plans to enrollees. Despite the fervor that conservatives and insurance companies have tried to cook up, this idea is nothing new. It originated in the 1970s, and was included in President Clinton’s 1993 Health Security Act, under the design of managing competition only in regional and corporate levels. Massachusetts has been often cited as a paradigm for the success of exchanges, and some states have implemented similar programs where residents can compare costs of specific services under different insurers and providers.
Urban Institute Predicts Costs of Health Care Bill Failure
As debate over health reform rages on, members of the Urban Institute cast a looming cloud over the climate of health care in the future if federal reform measures fail. Through their Health Insurance Stimulation Model, they augur a continued downturn in the industry over the next decade even in their best case scenario.
The full report can be accessed here. It contains predictions for all 50 states and the District of Columbia in the many issues that health care reform seeks to improve. It contains results following three models: a best case scenario, an intermediate case and a worst case. The general figures, in all cases, look grim. From state to state and from best to worst, the Urban Institute predicts that the number of uninsured Americans will increase, the amount of people with employer-sponsored insurance and their coverage will decrease, and public spending as well as individual and family out-of-pocket costs will increase. What remains to be seen is by how much.
Heated Debates on Medicare Advantage Cuts, Dems Jump on GOP Fear Tactics
All sides are raising hell in the debate over the health care overhaul, which one liberal group illustrates quite literally. A new ad from Americans United for Change released a spooky around the slogan, “Halloween comes early for health insurance giant Humana,” depicting Humana Inc. CEO Michael B. McCallister and various GOP big-names as devils and witches. In some circles, those aren’t far from the truth[1].
Many others on Capitol Hill are chastising what they claim are enflamed fear mongering, centering on the propaganda investigation against Humana, the nation’s second largest provider of controversial Medicare Advantage packages. Two weeks ago, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services placed a gag order on McCallister and began an investigation on letters Humana sent to enrollees about proposed Advantage cuts[2].
Online Heart Assessments Reach Out to At Risk Patients
Part of the trend in lowering health care costs through preventative medicine is offering subsidized or free screenings for major health issues. One organization steps further and offers a simple, user-friendly online risk assessment that links patients at risk for cardiovascular disease to these screenings at their local hospitals.
HeartAware Network (www.heartaware.com) sponsors this user-friendly preventative method, helping interested hospitals set up and run the program on their web sites in exchange for a monthly fee. Since its creation just five years ago, 85 hospitals have signed on and 600,000 have taken the risk assessment[1].