Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Each year, the California Health Care Foundation (CHCF) examines trends in employer health benefits in the state of California. Last year, I reported on the 2010 CHCF report and now I will examine the 2011 report. Between 2010 and 2011, some things have remained the same. Healthcare premiums are far outpacing inflation over the medium…
Medicare is a government-run insurance program. Can policy changes be made to add competition to Medicare, maintain quality and reduce cost? A book titled Bring Market Prices to Medicare argues that it can through a competitive bidding process. This book makes a number of sensible arguments which I review today. The main proposal of the…
In short, yes. California is the land of managed care. Kaiser-Permanente–the managed care poster child–owns one third of the market. Love for managed care is not just in the private market; in 2010, over half of all Medi-Cal and more than one-third of Medicare beneficiaries were enrolled in managed care plans. Further, California managed care…
For the under-65 population insured by Blue Cross, total spending per-member-year in McAllen, Texas, was 7 percent lower than in El Paso, Texas. By contrast, Atul Gawande’s 2009 New Yorker article, which used data from theDartmouth Atlas of Health Care on variations in Medicare spending, showed that per capita spending in McAllen was 86 percent higher…
Do Medicare beneficiaries in fee-for-service plans access better physicians than those in Medicare Managed Care (MMC) plans? Huesch (2010) attempts to answer this question for beneficiary access to quality cardiologists. Using data on heart patients without AMI in Florida, the authors observes the following results: “No evidence was found that Medicare payor type significantly influenced…
“The good thing about the systems not being highly integrated and coordinated is that premiums are lower. Why are those hospitals and physicians [integrating]? It wasn’t for increased coordination of care, disease management, blah, blah, blah—that was not the primary reason. They wanted more money and market share.” A Fresno, California medical group physician Using…
In the 1990s, State Medicaid programs turned to Managed Care Organizations (MCOs) to reduce costs. States such as Florida, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Ohio, South Carolina and Texas attempted to turn over their entire Medicaid programs to MCOs through waivers. For instance, in 2007 MO HealthNet mandated managed care for all participants by 2013. Some of the larger…
Hellinger (1995) defines any-willing-provider (AWP) and freedom-of-choice (FOC) laws. These laws have been enacted by a number of states. “AWP laws require managed care plans to accept any qualified provider who is willing to accept the terms and conditions of a managed care plan. These laws do not require managed care plans to contract with…
The California Healthcare Foundation looks at the latest health insurance trends in the nation’s most populous state. In California, like in many states, there is a blurring line between what defines an HMO compared to other forms of health insurance. Almost all insurance carriers now offer “a broad array of products, some of which do not…
Episodes of care are defined as the bundle of medical treatments used to treat an illness over a specified time period. Because all treatments are bundled together, these episodes have been thought to provide a superior unit of analysis in pay-for-performance (P4P) systems. In fact, Oxford Health Plan pioneered episode payment in the 1990s. [Later,…