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Matching entries from Managed Care Matters
When health insurance...isn't
Friday's New York Times had an excellent piece about the major changes occurring in the type of policies gaining traction in the group health insurance market - consumer-directed health plans with high deductibles. According to the NYT's Milt Freudenheim, more...
Debate questions for John McCain and Barack Obama
Tomorrow night's Presidential debate will undoubtedly feature a spirited discussion of the candidates' views on health reform. I'm not going to be sitting in front of the tube (rather, panel) blogging in real time as I'll be on a plane....
What happened to Aetna's work comp division?
The short answer is - it got combined with other sorta-kinda related businesses and put under one boss - Dan Fishbein, MD, in the "New Product Businesses" unit. According to an Aetna Communications staffer; "AWCA is part of the New...
McCain's fatal flaw
Something has been bothering me about Sen. McCain's health reform proposal, but till yesterday I couldn't put my virtual finger on it. Something just underneath the coverage of the details of the McCain plan's treatment of tax rates, personal health...
Shultz and Shoven miss the mark
Health care 'experts' are coming out of the woodwork like termites after fumigation. Former Sec of State George Shultz and Stanford professor John Shoven are two of the latest emergent experts; they have written a book on reforming social security...
Consumer-directed care done right
As I've noted repeatedly, there is a place for consumerism in health care, but it is by no means a panacea. And many CDH Plans are poorly designed and will likely lead to higher costs down the road - studies...
Why don't the GOP candidates want universal coverage?
Giuliani, McCain, Romney, Huckabee, and Thompson are all opposed to health care reform measures that incorporate universal coverage. Tax breaks, high deductible plans, consumerism - all are fine, but no GOP presidential candidates support universal coverage. Why not? A majority...
HSAs - Handsome Subsidies for the Affluent
I (and others) have long opined that HSAs are thinly-disguised tax breaks for the well-to-do. Touted as a solution to the growing number of the uninsured and cited as the plan of choice for the newly-insured, HSAs have been the...
Consumerism's big problem - reality
A strong dose of consumerism will solve the health care cost crisis because people will be more careful in spending their own money than they are when bills are paid by great big insurance companies. That’s the theory behind the...
Suit day
Today's a "suit day"; one of those increasingly-frequent days where business demands require something a bit more upscale than the usual. Today's event is the Piper Jaffray Healthcare Investor conference in NYC, where I'm on a panel discussing Consumer-directed health...
No, the Swiss are NOT proof that consumerism works
Regina Herzlinger of Harvard University is one of the more visible academic supporters of consumerism in health care. She's also wrong a good bit of the time, not in her statements of fact, but rather in her conclusions about what...
Has the CDHP movement peaked?
The latest data shows that while there has been some growth in the two types of consumer-directed health plans, it is not 'statistically significant' (3.8% of covered workers are enrolled in these plans in 2007, up from 2.7% in 2006)....
Murdoch is out! WSJ taken over by Chicken Little!
To listen to some, you would think single payer health care will cause the sky will fall, and it will be full of really large rocks when it hits our heads. At least that's what the editors at the Wall...
Health policy -- a question of philosophy or finance?
Here's the health care consumerism dilemma in one neat, small, understandable package. Advocates of consumerism in health care argue that forcing folks to pay for their care will make them better consumers, and thus reduce costs. Theoretically, that makes sense...
Will consumer-directed health care make it?
The statistics are starting to come in and they aren't pretty; Consumer directed health plans' growth is all but stalled. Despite advocates claims to the contrary, employers are just not buying into CDHPs. According to a study by the Kaiser...
Decisions about health care
The good folks at the California Healthcare Foundation explain why more information does not necessarily equal better consumerism. Their main point? Consumers' decision making processes are not linear, simple, or straightforward; the deep complexities of the health care decision-making process...
Docs don't think about patient costs
If consumerism is going to work, the consumers are going to have to think about costs. Problem is, the real consumers (physicians) don't think about patients' out-of-pocket costs. At least not when it comes to diagnostics and hospitalizations....
HWR's latest and greatest
Return with us once again to the enlightened pens (ok, keyboards) of the policy wonks as they pass on their pragmatic, practical, and perspicacious prose to you, dear reader, in this publication of HWR....
When consumers will shop for medical care
Consumers will price shop for some medical services, and won't for others. And the times they are most likely to shop are when services are after a diagnosis has been made, the services sought are relatively simple and elective, and...
Fixing CDHPs
As I've said a few times before, today's consumer-directed health care plans (CDHP) are not much different from the $100 deductible major medical plans of forty years ago. (That $100 is now equivalent to over $600) Although advocates loudly proclaim...
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