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The turmoil around the Affordable Care Act has created heartburn for health insurers. The industry is betting that a different government program will soothe its ills.
Big insurers have retreated from Obamacare’s individual market, where fighting over the future of the health law has contributed to financial losses. They’re focusing instead on Medicare Advantage, a politically popular program that’s being embraced by a growing population of older Americans.
Read more at Bloomberg
The American Medical Association’s House of Delegates voted to adopt new policies during the national physician organization’s annual meeting this week, and in the process reaffirmed its opposition to caps on Medicaid funding, eyeing a possible healthcare overhaul by Congress and the Trump administration.
Carl A. Sirio, MD, said in a statement that capping Medicaid funding would be “disastrous” for patients because it would limit medical responses to unforeseen events and medical innovations.
read more at healthcarefinancenews.com
During a lunch meeting with GOP senators on Wednesday, President Donald Trump called the House-version of the American Health Care Act “mean,” and urged them to make it more generous.
Trump reportedly talked about having a bill come out of the Senate that protects people with preexisting conditions and having a tax credit that works for low income elderly Americans, according to the story originally reported by the Associated Press.
read more at healthcarefinancenews.com
In 2009, Rep. Alan Grayson characterized the Republican approach to health care as “don’t get sick, and if you do, die quickly.” Eight years later, the Florida Democrat’s words ring truer than ever, especially in light of the House’s passage of the American Health Care Act.
According to the Congressional Budget Office, the bill would deprive 23 million of health insurance by 2026, resulting in substantial premium hikes and out-of-pocket expenses for older Americans and people with preexisting conditions. And the more Republicans are confronted with the devastating consequences of Trumpcare, the more evident it becomes how clueless they are on the Affordable Care Act specifically and health care more generally.
Read more at nationalmemo.com
The United States leads the world in artificial intelligence, but lags behind other countries in applying technical innovations to the field of healthcare. Globally, machine learning is used to increase efficiency, lower error rates, and decrease medical costs, but the fragmented marketplace and lack of universal healthcare in America disincentivize adoption of new technology as buyers often prioritize economics over patient care.
Sally Daub, CEO of Enlitic, a frontrunner in providing AI-based healthcare solutions, illuminates why healthcare technology adoption is stunted. “Here the conversation revolves around ‘Who is going to pay for this? What are the economic incentives to use this technology?’ rather than ‘Will this technology result in better outcomes for patients?’,” she explains. Payoff structures may even discourage insurers from footing the bill for early intervention treatments. If insurers don’t approve a new technology, they don’t issue insurance procedure codes necessary for healthcare providers to be reimbursed for services, which means providers won’t adopt the solution either.
Read more at forbes.com
President Donald Trump has been pushing hard, along with Republicans in Congress, to eliminate former President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act. But as he and leaders of the Senate and House struggle to come up with some alternative health care law, they might ask themselves why large companies like General Motors, Ford and Chrysler (now Fiat Chrysler) over recent decades have shifted roughly half their car and truck production — and the jobs that go with them — across the Detroit River into Canada.
Here’s one big reason they did it: Canada’s government-run single-payer health system, known as Medicare — to be clear, not the same Medicare as the American health care system for senior citizens — lowers those auto companies’ health care costs from more than $15,000 per worker in the United States to just a few thousand dollars in Canada, with all Canadian taxpayers, not just employees and their employers, picking up the tab.
Read more at salon.com
The health care debate has flooded the news as Congress attempts to repeal and craft a replacement for the Affordable Care Act — an increase of governmental involvement and regulation albeit considerably less than a single-payer system such as Canada’s. The costs of the law, it seems, have been the impetus for calls to replace it. In fact, enthusiasm for single-payer coverage plummets when people find out the coverage’s costs.
America’s health care system constitutes one-sixth of the nation’s economy. The Affordable Care Act has obvious problems: it is flawed in its conception and basic design, and is failing the American people. The public was not enthusiastic about the Affordable Care Act but got it anyway.
I recently received a letter from a constituent asking two questions: (1) Why is the United States the only advanced, industrialized country in the world without a single-payer health care system; and (2) Why does health care in the United States cost twice as much as that in other countries yet provides lesser results? I will approach these questions the way I do with every issue — with research. Remember, never substitute emotion for scholarship.
read more at dailyjournal.com
Yesterday in the U.S., the Republicans passed a vote in the House to repeal and replace the the Affordable Care Act (ACA) for the American Health Care Act (AHCA).
Though the bill still has to be passed into law (and there’s some doubt about that happening), it has plenty of Americans worried about their health care coverage — more, in fact, than might be assumed upon first glance.
According to Money magazine, under the AHCA, insurance companies will be able to charge people with pre-existing conditions more for their health insurance, an act currently banned by the ACA.
read more at huffingtonpost.ca
Many are still unhappy with Obamacare.
The main intent of the Affordable Care Act was to expand the safety net (Medicaid), regulate the non- employer-based private insurance market (the insurance exchanges) and help people buy that insurance (subsidies) in order to reduce the number of Americans who are uninsured.
On those metrics, it appears to be succeeding.
First and foremost, Obamacare was about improving access to healthcare. While it did improve access to insurance, in many, many other ways the United States is falling short. Things are likely to get worse before they get better.
Even with Obamacare, the Unites States still ranks poorly among comparable countries in insurance coverage. Even in 2016, when the rate of insured is the best it has ever been in the United States, Americans still have a greater percent of the population uninsured than pretty much any other industrialized nation in the world.
It was bound to happen sooner or later.
Donald Trump brought up Canadian health care as an example of a “flawed” public system during the second U.S. presidential debate at Washington University in St. Louis on Sunday.
Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2016/10/09/donald-trump-canada_n_12423178.html