Kevin Knauss: Health, History, Travel, Insurance
Posts related to Kaiser Permanente health plans in California for individuals, families, small groups, Covered California.
With the Affordable Care Act (ACA) mandating guarantee issue health insurance for individuals, just like small and large group health plans, has the era of large group employer based health insurance run its course? After all Americans have access to quality affordable health insurance through the state based health insurance exchanges and open market in 2014 the next battle will be to bring parity between individual, small and large group health insurance plans.
Covered California released their small business health option plans (SHOP) for small employers and they might prove competitive for some companies with less than 50 employees. There will absolutely be small businesses that will not participate because they don’t want to support any government bureaucracy, even if it is to their benefit.
Part of Covered California’s mission is to improve health care quality and lower costs. In an attempt to meet these goals they announced a partnership with the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) Foundation’s Choosing Wisely initiative. The Choosing Wisely initiative seeks to encourage better dialog between patients and physicians to reduce duplicative tests based on evidence when charting the most effective course of treatment.
Covered California will be offering 13 different health insurance plans to individuals and families. Some of the plans will be offered through large commercial insurance companies and other from smaller regional organizations. Ten of the thirteen plans have some form of easily accessible report card on their services from either a state agency or accreditation organization.
It’s hard to compare the plans side by side because of the diversity populations they serve and lack of data on some of the health insurance companies. Much of the information about the different health plans and companies is spread out over several different agencies, reports and websites.
It was nice to see that Kaiser of Northern California has put out an easy to read fee schedule for different office visits, procedures and lab tests.
With the release of the Covered California Standard Benefit Plans and the Cost Estimator on the website, health insurance plans through California’s health insurance exchange may prove to be unaffordable for what consumers expect.
