When Bernie Sanders released his long-awaited health care plan last month, it was light on the details. But it did include one major, crowd-pleasing promise: Under his Medicare-for-all proposal, no American would ever have to pay a deductible or co-payment to receive health care again. Deductibles and other forms of cost-sharing have been creeping up in the United States since the late 1990s. A typical employer health plan now asks an individual to pay more than $1,000 out of pocket before coverage kicks in for most services. The most popular plans on the Affordable Care Act exchanges require customers to pay several times as much. Even Medicare charges deductibles.
ObamaCare faces a tougher path ahead in enrolling the roughly 30 million people who remain uninsured, despite the record gains already made. The administration signed up 12.7 million people for coverage in 2016, a significant number, but only a small bump from the 11.7 million enrolled last year. Officials warned from the start that this year would be the hardest yet, because the people most eager to sign up already had. The health law has already made major gains, expanding coverage to 16.3 million people and lowering the uninsured rate to a record low of 9 percent, according to a survey last year from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
At a time when U.S. health care costs have been rising faster than inflation, the prices for many medical devices have been dropping. Included in the price declines are devices that helped build companies that employ tens of thousands of Minnesota workers. Key changes are driving the trend. The hospitals that buy most of the implantable medical devices in America have grown wary of incremental improvements long used by device makers to prop up prices on pacemakers, defibrillators and the like. And in a reverse of another long-standing practice, medical device makers are finding it much harder to rely on physician brand loyalty to drive purchasing decisions.
Pontiac's long-struggling Doctors' Hospital of Michigan could soon emerge from bankruptcy after a judge this week approved a reorganization plan that would sell metro Detroit's last remaining independent hospital to a family-run private equity firm. The firm, called Sant Partners, says it intends to expand the hospital's medical services and provide better overall management to return to profitability. The hospital's current CEO will remain in place but take a pay cut. U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Walter Shapiro on Tuesday chose the firm's reorganization plan over that proposed by a competing group, the Save the Hospital Group, which is affiliated with metro Detroit physicians and brothers Dr. Greg Naman and Dr. Ted Naman.
Twenty major companies—including American Express Co., Macy's Inc.and Verizon Communications Inc.—are banding together to use their collective data and market power in a bid to hold down the cost of providing workers with health-care benefits. The newly formed alliance of companies, which cover about four million people among them, plan to share information about members' employee health spending and outcomes, with an eye toward using findings to change how they contract for care. [Subscription Required]
Stung by losses under the federal health law, major insurers are seeking to sharply limit how policies are sold to individuals in ways that consumer advocates say seem to discriminate against the sickest and could hold down future enrollment. In recent days Anthem, Aetna and Cigna, all among the top five health insurers, told brokers they will stop paying them sales commissions to sign up most customers who qualify for new coverage outside the normal enrollment period, according to the companies and broker documents. The health law allows people who lose other coverage, families with new children and others in certain circumstances to buy insurance after enrollment season ends.