WASHINGTON — Estimates from 19 states operating health insurance exchanges to help the uninsured find coverage show that at least 8.5 million will use the exchanges to buy insurance, a USA TODAY survey shows. That would far outstrip the federal government's estimate of 7 million new customers for all 50 states under the 2010 health care law. USA TODAY contacted the 50 states, and 19 had estimates for how many of their uninsured residents they expect will buy through the exchanges. About 48 million Americans were uninsured in 2011, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.
The Obama administration's decision to delay a requirement that employers provide their workers with health insurance "will have relatively few consequences" on the overall rollout of ObamaCare. That's the finding of a new study by the Rand Corporation, a nonprofit research organization, that looked at the effects of the administration's July decision to delay by a year a crucial provision of the healthcare reform law. The measure requires that companies with more than 50 full-time employees offer them health insurance or pay a penalty. It was scheduled go into effect next year, but is being pushed back to 2015 to accommodate businesses that had protested the requirement.
The "young invincibles" are what health policy wonks call healthy young adults (18-30) who don't see being uninsured as a problem. But it is a problem, at least for the success of the Affordable Care Act. That's why the Department of Health and Human Services is spending $30,000 on prizes for a national video contest, in a frank appeal to the YouTube generation. The digital demographic may not know co-pays from co-insurance, but creating and uploading free "content" practically defines that generation. HHS hopes to tap that creativity and essentially get young adults to market Obamacare to themselves.
Less than two months before health exchanges open to the public, hospitals are asking to change a part of the Affordable Care Act that leaves them at financial risk for patients who fall behind on their insurance premiums. The hospitals said in an Aug. 15 letter that the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services should reconsider the way health-insurance exchanges divide the financial responsibility for delinquent customers. The letter was signed by the American Hospital Association, the Federation of American Hospitals, and the Association of American Medical Colleges. "We are very concerned about our risk for giving uncompensated care," Joanne Alig, senior vice president for policy and research at the Wisconsin Hospital Association, said in a telephone interview.
WASHINGTON — Doctors who have a financial interest in radiation treatment centers are much more likely to prescribe such treatments for patients with prostate cancer, Congressional investigators say in a new report. The investigators, from the Government Accountability Office, said that Medicare beneficiaries were often unaware that their doctors stood to profit from the use of radiation therapy. Alternative treatments may be equally effective and are less expensive for Medicare and for beneficiaries, the report said. In other recent studies, the auditors found a similar pattern when doctors owned laboratories and imaging centers that billed Medicare for CT scans and magnetic resonance imaging.
While Clark County commissioners spent the past decade studying, debating and then studying some more about what to do with University Medical Center, public hospitals around the country have been adapting to the evolving health care landscape. One of the major changes undertaken in cities such as Atlanta, Minneapolis and Denver was to get government out of the hospital and give oversight responsibilities to an independent board of experts. The changes have been accomplished in different ways in different cities — in some, hospitals were spun off into nonprofit corporations, in others they were made into stand-alone government subsidiaries — but the results have generally been positive, leading to increases in philanthropic giving, better care and a more stable financial outlook.