On the same day that officials at Little Dixie Community Action Agency in Hugo, Okla., won a $580,000 federal grant to help consumers sign up for coverage under the federal health law, they received a warning from the state's top insurance regulator. Commissioner John Doak said that if the new insurance guides known as "navigators" perform any of the duties of state-licensed insurance agents, "we will put a stop to it." He also called the $1.6 million award to hire and train navigators in Oklahoma — part of $67 million nationwide — "a waste" because it would duplicate the work of better-trained agents.
There will be glitches when the major provisions of the Affordable Care Act are implemented starting Oct. 1. Huge glitches. Many glitches. Bet on it. That is a prediction not only from those resolutely opposed to the ACA. Even those quite excited about President Barack Obama's federal health law have the same expectation: The rollout of the biggest new social program in nearly 50 years is not going to be pretty. "When you're dealing with tens of millions of new clients, mistakes are inevitable," said Henry Aaron, a health economist at the Brookings Institution. "You're going to have thousands of mistakes."
Phil Ennen runs a rural hospital system in northwest Ohio that admits about 2,500 people a year, many of them poor or elderly. He's got the only emergency cardiac catheterization lab between Toledo and Fort Wayne, Indiana. Ennen estimates he'd be out $1.3 million a year and struggle to stay independent if business groups and Governor John Kasich can't persuade fellow Republicans to expand Medicaid to cover more poor people under President Barack Obama's Affordable Care Act. "I don't have any time to be political about this," Ennen, 50, said in a telephone interview from Bryan. "I'm going to have people walking through our door needing care who should have a source of payment and won't, and that's frustrating."
The nation's health spending will bump up next year as the Affordable Care Act expands insurance coverage to more Americans, and then will grow by an average of 6.2 percent a year over the next decade, according to projections by government actuaries. That estimate is lower than the typical annual increases before the recession hit. Still, the actuaries forecast that in a decade the health care segment of the nation's economy will be larger than it is today, amounting to a fifth of the gross domestic product in 2022. They attributed that to the rising number of baby boomers moving into Medicare and the expectation that the economy will improve, according to a published online in the journal Health Affairs.
(Reuters) - Seven hospital systems in New Jersey and Pennsylvania will form what executives say will be the largest U.S. healthcare alliance in the country. The number of hospital mergers has soared in the past several years as providers band together to increase their power to negotiate higher reimbursement rates from insurers. Called AllSpire Health Partners, the alliance will allow the member institutions to save on costs and share medical expertise, the hospital systems said on Thursday. The alliance is part of a trend towards market consolidation as the Affordable Care Act is pushing hospitals to achieve greater negotiating leverage, said Joel Cantor, director of the Center for State Health Policy at Rutgers University.
Do not panic over healthcare costs. We may finally be on the cusp of learning to control them. So maintains McKinsey & Co. director Tom Latkovic in a new article. The key, he says: The entire system must shift to paying providers based on results, not tasks. To get there, says Latkovic, "the United States needs fewer component providers who specialize in a single task, such as taking diagnostic images. Instead, it will need more healers (providers who can achieve specific objectives for patients during episodes of care) and partners (providers who can help improve a patient's health and wellness over a longer period of time)."