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Summary of Health Insurance Plan Regulation
Summary of Health Insurance Plan Regulation
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Shifting costs from public to private payers
December 11, 2008
Shifting costs from public to private payers
By Charlie BakerThe other day, the American Hospital Association, the Blue Cross / Blue Shield Association, Premera Blue Cross and America’s Health Insurance Plans (FYI - HPHC is a member and I’m on the Board of AHIP) released a joint study on public and private payment rates.
The study was prepared by Milliman, Inc., one of the nation’s most well known number-crunching health care consulting firms. Readers of this blog will not be surprised to learn that the study shows that Medicare and Medicaid pay a lot less for health care services than the Blue Cross and private health plans pay. But I must say, even I was a little surprised by the size of the differential.
The Milliman data - which is actually 2006 for hospitals and 2007 for physicians - which means IT’S WORSE NOW - calculates a $90 BILLION cost shift from the public payors and onto the private plans. More specifically, Milliman indicates the cost shift is worth a $51 billion differential in hospital payments, and a $40 billion differential in payments to physicians.
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The Robert Woods Johnson Foundation has published an issues brief analyzing the drivers of health care cost increases.
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Health-Care Premiums Expected To Jump 8.7% in 2008, Study Says
NEW YORK -- Health-care premiums of employers and their workers rose by more than twice the rate of inflation in 2007, and cost increases are expected to accelerate next year, with employees picking up a larger slice of the bill, according to a study released Monday by Hewitt Associates, a global human resources company.
The cost of providing health-care benefits to employees rose by 5.3% on average in 2007, down from 7.9% in 2006 and the smallest increase in nine years. However, Hewitt predicts that health-care costs will jump by 8.7% on average in 2008, bringing the average annual premium cost per employee to $8,676 from $7,982 now.
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Rendell health care plan faces challenge in getting through this year
Despite intense lobbying by Gov. Ed Rendell, little progress is expected before June on his plan to extend health coverage to the state's uninsured and relief for small businesses from health insurance rate volatility, legislative and business leaders say.
"Frankly, with so much terribly difficult work to do and the clock ticking on the budget, it'll be very hard to get anything done by June 30," said Cliff Shannon, president of Churchill-based SMC Business Councils, the region's biggest advocacy group for small business. "Unless you solve the problem of wildly volatile rates, you're going to lose ground."
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Benefit Design Innovations: Implications for Consumer-Directed Health Care
Current health insurance benefit designs that simply rely on higher, one-size-fits-all, patient cost sharing have limited potential to curb rapidly rising costs, but innovations in benefit design can potentially make cost sharing a more effective tool, according to a new study by the Center for Studying Health System Change (HSC).
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Enrollment in Consumer-Driven Plans Remains Low
The 2nd Annual EBRI/Commonwealth Fund Consumerism in Health Care Survey, 2006: Early Experience With High-Deductible and Consumer-Driven Health Plans
This report presents findings from the Employee Benefit Research Institute/Commonwealth Fund Consumerism in Health Care Survey, 2006, the second annual version of this survey. The online survey of 3,158 privately insured adults ages 21–64 was conducted to provide nationally representative data regarding the growth of consumer-directed health plans (CDHPs) and high-deductible health plans (HDHPs), and their impact on the behavior and attitudes of health care consumers.