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01
Jun
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By: Stephen Hyde
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How They Can Survive and Thrive For America’s community hospitals, using the traditional cost-shifting revenue model is the maddening equivalent of simultaneously playing rugby, Australian-rules football, major-league baseball, and cricket—dictated by the rules of multiple third-party payers rather than by rational pricing models. Success is ultimately dependent on having enough privately insured patients to subsidize the government ones and the uninsured. In most places, this model has allowed hospitals to earn sufficient margins to support ongoing capital replacement and growth while staying abreast of technological advances. But in economically stressed locations lacking critical masses of private payers, many institutions have gone broke (including fourteen in Los Angeles in one recent year). As pressures on cost-shifting intensify under health reform (See Parts 1 & 2), community hospitals will increasingly adopt new coping strategies to survive. Two in particular, consolidation and integration, have become popular in recent years. Unfortunately, neither will fix the problem. |
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2 Comments » |
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24
May
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By: Stephen Hyde
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Employers to the Rescue? In Part 1, I explained how the only way hospitals have been able to survive their money-losing Medicare and Medicaid patients has been to charge higher rates to private payers. That’s why private insurance now costs $1,788 more per family than it would if the government paid the same provider prices as everyone else. Moreover, health reform’s promised addition of 15 million new Medicaid patients, along with billions of dollars in lower Medicare payments, will drive the demand for private subsidies even higher. Additionally, as the current 27 million individually insured begin transitioning to the insurance exchanges in 2014, their continued ability to pay higher hospital charges is doubtful. Ditto for the 17 million uninsured who are expected to sign up for exchange insurance. Indeed, under health reform, exchange insurers may need their own external financial assistance. That leaves only private, employer-based insurance to pick up the slack by paying ever higher hospital prices. That, too, is unlikely to happen. |
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4 Comments » |
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19
May
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By: Stephen Hyde
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A couple of weeks ago I sent a letter with supporting documentation to the publisher of a local (and mercifully low-circulation) tabloid, the Colorado Springs Business Journal, pointing out material errors in its reporting on my views and activities when I served on a local citizens commission charged with determining the fate of city-owned Memorial Hospital. I never heard back from him, but did exchange subsequent emails and phone calls with his editor, Allen Greenberg, resulting in his agreement to make limited corrections of some of the more blatant misstatements in reporter Amy Gillentine’s article. Nonetheless, the original, uncorrected article remains on the paper’s website, and my Google search of the promised language fails to find it anywhere. Unsurprisingly, I don’t read the paper itself, so missed any printed notice that may have appeared. |
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2 Comments » |
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06
May
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By: Stephen Hyde
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MEDICAID, MEDICARE, AND THE INSURANCE EXCHANGES The new health reform law’s central message to America’s hospitals is a classic good news/bad news story. First, the good news. Hospital exposure to 46 million uninsured Americans showing up in their ERs is about to drop by two-thirds over the next several years. Medicaid alone is predicted to take on 15 million of them, as the states—with temporarily enhanced federal assistance—expand eligibility to cover all non-seniors who fall below 133 percent of the federal poverty level ($24,350 for a family of three). And assuming the individual insurance mandate survives likely court challenges, another 17 million uninsured will be required to buy subsidized private health insurance through new state health insurance exchanges beginning in 2014. This adds up to 32 million people who hospitals will no longer have to treat for free under the federal EMTALA law and their own charity-care policies. |
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6 Comments » |
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15
Apr
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By: Stephen Hyde
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We know that more than half of all medical cost is wasted, adding no value to the patient. We also know that the total costs of medical provider billing, collection, and payment consume as much as 30% of every health care dollar—about ten times the transaction costs in every other industry. If medical care were as efficient as, say, our economy’s food sector, it would provide higher quality for a third of today’s $2.6 trillion cost and free up $1.7 trillion every year for higher wages, lower federal deficits, and a major boost in job-creating private-sector investment. Moreover, 75% of all medical spending now goes to treat preventable chronic diseases. If we could figure out how to get people to stop eating, drinking, and smoking themselves to death, and cut out the wasteful spending, our total medical bill would plummet to only 10-20% of today’s level. |
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3 Comments » |
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05
Apr
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By: Stephen Hyde
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Dear Readers, I need your help (and no, it’s not a request for money). The attorneys general (AGs) in at least 14 states (Colorado, Louisiana, Florida, South Carolina, Alabama, Nebraska, Texas, Pennsylvania, Washington, Utah, North Dakota, South Dakota,Idaho, and Indiana) have joined together to challenge the constitutionality of the just-passed federal mandate that will require all documented American residents to purchase health insurance beginning in 2014. As a former health insurance actuary, I support this challenge on the basis of my extensive analysis and conclusion that there are voluntary alternatives to mandates that will be even more effective at providing universal health insurance access while preventing the adverse selection (i.e., free-riding) that would otherwise destroy any universally available health insurance exchange like that specified by the federal law. |
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No Comments » |
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29
Mar
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By: Stephen Hyde
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About the same time I saw a picture of the man I voted for signing the new health reform bill, I received an email with a picture of George Bush (The Younger) waving at the camera with one of his goofier grins and the caption, “Miss me yet?” I’m hardly a Bush fan, but at the moment—God help me—I’m even missing Nixon. One of the annoyances from having spent forty years inside the health care beast is having to endure the blatant half-truths and patent falsehoods coming from our President and his legions of economics-challenged health reform advisors and supporters. Particularly abrading are his statements about the “immediate benefits” of the new law, with no mention of the equally immediate costs that will accompany them. Here are some of the more bothersome ones:
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7 Comments » |
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16
Mar
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By: Stephen Hyde
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One of President Obama’s most frequent health reform mantras is, “If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan.” This is consistent with his belief that we “must build on the current employer-based system” that insures 158 million people who comprise the vast bulk of all privately insured Americans. There is just one problem with this approach: employer-provided group insurance is dying and cannot be saved. Despite its longstanding dominance, group insurance, whether self-funded or provided by outside insurers, suffers from major flaws that are increasingly exposing its fundamental unsuitability as an even partial solution for effective health care reform. This is true for all employers, no matter what size. Here are group insurance’s more pronounced shortcomings: 1. Lack of Portability: Group insurance ties the individual to his or her job, an anachronism in an era when people change their jobs as often as their cars. And if you lose your job through layoffs or illness, you soon lose your insurance as well. If you can’t find affordable individual coverage, then welcome to the ranks of the uninsured. |
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2 Comments » |
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08
Mar
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By: Stephen Hyde
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As part of his last-ditch effort to revive the Senate’s undead health reform bill, President Obama has proposed a federal board to veto health insurance premiums it finds “unreasonable and unjustified.” In case you’re wondering, all 50 states already do this, albeit with the countervailing requirement that premiums must also be “adequate” to assure insurance carrier solvency—a key requirement the President ignores. His proposal is the obvious result of his Administration’s high dudgeon over Wellpoint’s 39% individual premium hikes in California (where it has lost millions). The argument is that such increases are unconscionable from an industry that earned “$12 billion in profits last year.” Please note the inapt comparison of percentages with dollars, a diversionary, demagogic tactic often used to enrage the innumerate while failing to note Wellpoint’s 2009 operating profit margin of 4.8% or the entire industry’s hopelessly pedestrian 2.2%. Even more absurd was one congresswoman’s snarky suggestion that the real reason for the increases was to maintain WellPoint CEO Angela Braly’s $9 million annual compensation—equal to twenty-eight cents per member per year. The cause of premium increases is not profits or executive compensation. To paraphrase President Clinton, “It’s rising medical costs, stupid!” |
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4 Comments » |
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22
Feb
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By: Stephen Hyde
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As we approach Thursday’s bipartisan health summit, no one has yet successfully challenged the comprehensive health reform proposal I describe in my book, speeches, media interviews, and this blog. It has withstood all technical, actuarial, financial, behavioral, and economic challenges to date. This would be gratifying if it weren’t for one annoying loose end—the political issue. Almost everybody tells me that my approach’s lack of sound-bite simplicity renders it DOA as a workable legislative agenda. They have a point. As bad as our health care system is, it’s not yet bad enough to engender the kind of political will necessary to put American consumers fully in charge of buying their own health insurance and medical care. Until we get there, let me offer a simpler, interim proposal that will immediately offer relief from out-of-control medical costs: we should make everyone financially responsible for his own preventable illnesses. |
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8 Comments » |
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