Health Care Policy and Marketplace Review 
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This is an RSS file. You can use it to subscribe to this data in your favourite RSS reader or to display this data on your own website or blog.With the November Election Six Months Away Obamacare is Up For Grabs
House Energy and Commerce Committee Republicans seemed surprised last week when representatives of the insurance industry reported that they didn't have enough data yet to forecast prices for next year's health insurance exchanges, the market was not about to blow up, and that so far at least 80% of consumers have paid for the health insurance policies they purchased on the exchanges. The (Source: Health Care Policy and Marketplace Review)
Source: Health Care Policy and Marketplace Review - May 13, 2014 Category: Medical Lawyers and Insurers Authors: ROBERT LASZEWSKI Source Type: blogs
Obamacare Observations From the Marketplace
A few observations from my travels and conversations in the marketplace:
About half of the enrollments are coming from people who were previously insured and half are not. When I try to gauge this, I go to carriers who had high market share before Obamacare and have maintained that through the first open enrollment. Some carriers have said only a small percentage of their enrollments had (Source: Health Care Policy and Marketplace Review)
Source: Health Care Policy and Marketplace Review - April 22, 2014 Category: Medical Lawyers and Insurers Authors: ROBERT LASZEWSKI Source Type: blogs
Virginia Should Take the Obamacare Medicaid Expansion Money and So Should All Republican States
In a September 2012 post on this blog, I said that Republican governors should be expanding their Medicaid programs under Obamacare. I argued that Republicans have long called for state block grants and the flexibility to run their own Medicaid programs in what are the state "laboratories of democracy."
I made the point that, given the then recent Supreme Court decision enabling states to opt (Source: Health Care Policy and Marketplace Review)
Source: Health Care Policy and Marketplace Review - April 14, 2014 Category: Medical Lawyers and Insurers Authors: ROBERT LASZEWSKI Source Type: blogs
Mission Accomplished?––7.1 Million––Will the Obama Administration Come To Regret Today's Obamacare Enrollment Announcement?
Politics is about expectations.
The Obama administration blew the doors off Obamacare's enrollment expectations this week and scored big political points.
But in doing so, they may have set Obamacare's expectations going forward at a level that can only undermine their credibility and that of the new health law.
What happens when the real number––the number of people who actually completed (Source: Health Care Policy and Marketplace Review)
Source: Health Care Policy and Marketplace Review - April 1, 2014 Category: Medical Lawyers and Insurers Authors: ROBERT LASZEWSKI Source Type: blogs
Was Obamacare Worth It? How Many of the Previously Uninsured Have Really Signed Up?
Health insurance reform was long overdue. But did it need to be done the way the architects of the Affordable Care Act did it?
Obamacare was enacted, and the private health insurance market fundamentally changed, so that we could cover millions of people who previously couldn't get coverage.
Are enough people getting coverage who didn't have it before to justify
the sacrifices the people who (Source: Health Care Policy and Marketplace Review)
Source: Health Care Policy and Marketplace Review - March 30, 2014 Category: Medical Lawyers and Insurers Authors: ROBERT LASZEWSKI Source Type: blogs
The One Thing That Could Save Obamacare––And The Obama Administration Needs To Do It In the Next Month
To properly price the exchange health insurance business going forward
the carriers have to sharply increase the rates. A senior executive for
Wellpoint, which sells plans in 14 Obamacare exchanges, is quoted in a Reuters article
telling Wall Street analysts there will be big rate increases in 2015,
"Looking at the rate increases on a year-over-year basis on our
exchanges, and it will vary (Source: Health Care Policy and Marketplace Review)
Source: Health Care Policy and Marketplace Review - March 25, 2014 Category: Medical Lawyers and Insurers Authors: ROBERT LASZEWSKI Source Type: blogs
What Individual Mandate? It is Looking More and More Like the Obama Administration Will Not Enforce the Individual Mandate
It looks to me the Obama administration will claim at least 6 million
enrollments by the end of March. But that will mean 75% of subsidy
eligible people will not have bought a plan.
Will the 2014 mandate to buy health insurance be enforced come tax time?
It sure doesn't look like it.
To
be sure, the administration is not making any major announcements prior
to the close of open enrollment (Source: Health Care Policy and Marketplace Review)
Source: Health Care Policy and Marketplace Review - March 24, 2014 Category: Medical Lawyers and Insurers Authors: ROBERT LASZEWSKI Source Type: blogs
Republicans Considering Proposing High-Risk Pools––Health Insurance Ghettos
We are hearing that Republicans are considering proposing high-risk pools as part of an alternative health insurance reform proposal to Obamacare.
A high-risk pool proposal would likely mean the Congress giving states the flexibility, and perhaps funding, to set up these risk pools. Risk pools by definition are a place where people can go when they are not able to buy health insurance in the (Source: Health Care Policy and Marketplace Review)
Source: Health Care Policy and Marketplace Review - March 19, 2014 Category: Medical Lawyers and Insurers Authors: ROBERT LASZEWSKI Source Type: blogs
Silly Republican Insurance Reform Ideas––Selling Insurance Across State Lines and Association Health Plans
There are news reports indicating Republicans will be proposing such longstanding health insurance reform ideas as selling insurance across state lines and association health plans.
These ideas have been around for some time and have served Republicans as convenient talking points out on the campaign trail positioned as common sense alternatives to Obamacare.
When I discuss these ideas with (Source: Health Care Policy and Marketplace Review)
Source: Health Care Policy and Marketplace Review - March 17, 2014 Category: Medical Lawyers and Insurers Authors: ROBERT LASZEWSKI Source Type: blogs
Gallup: The Number of Those Uninsured Is Falling––Why All of the Amazement?
Reading the many press reports about the new Gallup poll estimating the number of the uninsured I couldn't help be surprised by their surprise.
Under the headline, "Obamacare Working?" CBS reported that Gallup found the uninsured rate had fallen to 15.9% in a survey taken during January and February. That was down from 17.1% at the end of 2013––a reduction of 2.5 million adult Americans.
Other (Source: Health Care Policy and Marketplace Review)
Source: Health Care Policy and Marketplace Review - March 11, 2014 Category: Medical Lawyers and Insurers Authors: ROBERT LASZEWSKI Source Type: blogs
Obamacare: The Uninsured Are Not Signing Up Because the Dogs Don't Like It
Here's my version of a classic corporate marketing story from the 1980s:
A big dog food company decided to come out with the latest and greatest new dog food. They hired the smartest consultants from the big universities in Boston to advise them. They had their scientists, who know far more about nutrition than any consumers or the dogs, come up with the most nutritious formula they were (Source: Health Care Policy and Marketplace Review)
Source: Health Care Policy and Marketplace Review - March 6, 2014 Category: Medical Lawyers and Insurers Authors: ROBERT LASZEWSKI Source Type: blogs
Extending the Obamacare Cancelled Policy Moratorium––One More Contortion in the Pretzel
The administration has confirmed that the individual policies that were supposed to be cancelled because of Obamacare can now remain in force another two years.
For months I have been saying millions of individual health insurance policies will be cancelled by year-end––most deferred until December because of the carriers' early renewal programs and because of President Obama's request the (Source: Health Care Policy and Marketplace Review)
Source: Health Care Policy and Marketplace Review - March 5, 2014 Category: Medical Lawyers and Insurers Authors: ROBERT LASZEWSKI Source Type: blogs
More Obamacare Unravelling
On Friday, I asked if Obamacare was unraveling.
The Obama administration announced today that they are delaying the employer mandate again.
In the announcement, they said that large employers, those with at least 100 workers, will only have to cover 70% of their otherwise eligible workforce in 2015 and 95% in 2016 and beyond.
The administration also said that employers with 50 to 100 workers (Source: Health Care Policy and Marketplace Review)
Source: Health Care Policy and Marketplace Review - February 10, 2014 Category: Medical Lawyers and Insurers Authors: ROBERT LASZEWSKI Source Type: blogs
Is Obamacare Unraveling?
Rumors have been circulating in the marketplace all week that the administration was thinking of extending the individual health insurance policies that Obamacare was supposed to have cancelled for as much as three more years.
Those rumors have now come out into the open with Tom Murphy's AP story that began running today.
That the administration might extend these polices shouldn't come as a (Source: Health Care Policy and Marketplace Review)
Source: Health Care Policy and Marketplace Review - February 7, 2014 Category: Medical Lawyers and Insurers Authors: ROBERT LASZEWSKI Source Type: blogs
Judging Hospital Quality and Narrow Networks––Barking Up the Wrong Tree?
It isn't news for anyone to suggest the most expensive hospitals may not be worth the money.
A recent paper published in the journal Health Affairs, "Understanding Differences Between High- and Low-Price Hospitals: Implications For Efforts To Rein In Costs" makes some excellent points regarding the pricing power of the largest hospitals and the wide variation in local prices. But then it (Source: Health Care Policy and Marketplace Review)
Source: Health Care Policy and Marketplace Review - February 5, 2014 Category: Medical Lawyers and Insurers Authors: ROBERT LASZEWSKI Source Type: blogs
