Kevin Knauss: Health, History, Travel, Insurance
Posts related to health insurance for individuals, families, small groups, enrollment, eligibility in California, plans, coverage, benefits.
Covered California has already awarded $43 million for public outreach and education. Seven of the recipients that received grant money are organizations that are already involved with the health care industry. Yet we need more money spent just to talk to doctors, nurses and physical therapists?
Senator Mitch McConnell (R-Ky) and John Cornyn (R-Tex) have sent letters to major league sports organizations urging them not to cooperate with the President Obama’s marketing push to make all U.S. citizens aware that they can enroll in affordable health insurance for 2014. Can you host a health care reform party at your home to push back against the organized opposition fighting to see the Affordable Care Act fail?
One of the spillover effects from the Affordable Care Act is that the insurance companies are streamlining not only their health insurance plans but their ancillary insurance products like dental and vision. Anthem Blue Cross has just released new dental and vision plans that are straight forward and easy to understand.
Children’s dental insurance options have now been added to the line of plans being offered through California’s health insurance exchange Covered California. Part of the ten Essential Health Benefits that must be offered through the new health insurance exchanges or Marketplaces is pediatric dental. The state exchanges can meet this requirement in various ways and Covered California has opted to offer stand alone plans.
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.
Aetna hinted in their announcement that a combination of the new health insurance exchange and required benefits forced them to pull the plug on their individual plans. In recent years, Aetna has never been very competitive in terms of price with other carriers such as Anthem Blue Cross, Health Net and Blue Shield of California
Covered California hosted another webinar to provide a progress update of the California Healthcare Eligibility, Enrollment and Retention System (CalHEERS) website. In short, this is the website Californians will use to enroll in one of the qualified health plans offered in their area through Covered California.
The emergency regulations force all “non-grandfathered” plans to include the 10 EHBs which means that plans offered through Covered California won’t be put at a substantial competitive disadvantage. Plans not offering all the benefits would have been priced lower than plans in the state exchange. While health insurance plans offered outside the Covered California may still be less expensive for a variety of reasons, at least they will have equivalent benefit designs.
California residents were invited to ask questions about the new Covered California health plans in a live chat held through Facebook this past Thursday. Ken Wood, Senior Advisor for Products, Marketing and Health Plan Relationships for Covered California, answered 47 questions over 90 minutes. While fourteen of the questions dealt with different aspects of the health plans being offered, the bulk of the questions focused on income requirements for the tax credits and coverage options for different family scenarios.
While the filed rate increases of Anthem Blue Cross may be unreasonable that hardly justifies their being banned from the Covered California small employer group program. There is also the prospect that Anthem Blue Cross might be forecasting a sharp drop in membership of their small group plans as small businesses abandon the plans or employees leave to purchase subsidized health insurance through Covered California.
