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Together Rx Access Program Expands Eligibility for Drug Discounts
Tweet Share on Facebook March 19, 2009 Comment (7)Getting people to stick to their prescribed medication regimens is tough, even in the best of times. But when someone loses a job or health insurance and money is tight, it's even more tempting to skip taking the pills that are critical to health and well-being.
The Kaiser Family Foundation's February health tracking poll found that more than half of people said they've cut back on necessary healthcare in the past year because of cost. Of those, 21 percent said they didn't fill a prescription they needed, and 15 percent said they split pills or skipped doses of medications.
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'Budgeting for Infertility' Authors Sterling, Best-Boss Offer Help for Couples
Tweet Share on Facebook March 17, 2009 Comment (9)Fertility treatments are an often expensive gamble but one that a growing number of would-be parents are willing to take. In their new book, Budgeting for Infertility, coauthors Evelina Weidman Sterling and Angie Best-Boss provide hopeful moms and dads with a manual for managing the one part of the fertility treatment process they can control: Paying for it. I spoke with Evelina Weidman Sterling, who has a Ph.D. in public health and has conceived two children with assisted reproductive technology, about the book.
What made you decide to do this book?
Infertility treatments can be exorbitantly expensive, and 70 percent of people pay for them completely out of pocket. In vitro fertilization can cost anywhere from $15,000 to $70,000 per attempt, and it can take several attempts. People can spend as much on family building as on a car or a house, and there are books out there on how to be a smart consumer in those areas. But not for fertility treatments. We wanted to tell people how to be a smart consumer and mitigate costs. -
Flexible Spending Account Strategies for Tough Economic Times
Tweet Share on Facebook March 10, 2009 Comment (16)If you're worried about losing your job, deciding what to do about your health insurance coverage may be your most pressing benefits concern. But there's another health-related benefit that bears considering: your flexible spending account.
FSAs allow employees to contribute money to an account on a pretax basis to pay for healthcare expenses. These payroll deductions, which typically amount to a couple thousand dollars a year, cover out-of-pocket healthcare expenses like dental work, eyeglasses, insurance deductibles, and over-the-counter drugs.
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President Obama Hosts Health Reform Summit
Tweet Share on Facebook March 5, 2009 Comment (5)"It takes a village," then first lady Hillary Clinton noted, to raise a child. Judging by the cast of thousands that attended President Obama's health reform summit today, the same might be said of nurturing national health reform (though now Secretary of State Clinton was conspicuously absent from this event, as she has been in general on healthcare reform since joining team Obama).
The purpose of the event was ostensibly to bring various stakeholders together to discuss ideas about how to reduce healthcare spending and improve health insurance coverage. And indeed, representatives of many interest groups were present, from insurers to private companies to patient advocacy groups, as well as dozens of elected officials. (Even the single-payer advocates got an invite to the summit, albeit a tardy one, I'm told.)
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8 Questions You May Have About the New COBRA Subsidy
Tweet Share on Facebook March 5, 2009 Comment (110)After I wrote about the new COBRA health insurance subsidy that was enacted as part of the economic stimulus package President Obama signed a few weeks ago, more than a hundred readers wrote in asking for specifics. Anxious readers who had lost their jobs wanted to know how they could apply for the subsidy, which will cover 65 percent of laid-off workers' COBRA health insurance premiums if they choose to continue their health insurance under their former employer's plan. The reason for their concern is no mystery: The federal law known as COBRA that permits them to extend their health insurance also requires them to pay 100 percent of the premium, plus an administrative fee of 2 percent. For people trying to get by on an unemployment insurance check of around $325 a week, shelling out $1,000 or more a month for health insurance is often not feasible. Even a helping hand of 65 percent doesn't make COBRA cheap, but for some the subsidy will at least make coverage affordable.
Unfortunately, passing the law is only the first step in the process. A significant amount of bureaucratic machinery must grind into gear before the federal government is ready to actually start paying for the subsidy. In fact, consumers may not get relief until May, says Cheryl Fish-Parcham, deputy director of health policy for Families USA, a consumer advocacy organization. If that happens, people who've paid their full premiums for March and/or April will be able to get either a refund for premiums paid since February 17, when the bill was signed, or a credit against future premiums.
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Obama Announces $155 Million for Community Health Centers
Tweet Share on Facebook March 3, 2009 Comment (8)Along with introducing his picks for top Department of Health and Human Services posts yesterday, President Obama announced something that may touch closer to home for many uninsured and underinsured Americans: $155 million to establish 126 new community health centers across the United States. (You can click here to go to the list of states that will receive more funding and links to existing community health centers in your area.)
Community health centers, which provide mostly primary care and preventive services to all comers at more than 7,000 locations, served 18 million people last year. As workers lose their jobs and employers pull back on coverage, those numbers are growing, according to the National Association of Community Health Centers. By law, no one is turned away from a community health center; patients are charged a sliding fee based on their ability to pay.
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Medicare Spending on Patients Varies Widely by State, Region
Tweet Share on Facebook February 27, 2009 Comment (16)There's no good explanation for why Medicare spent more than $9,500 per patient on healthcare in New York in 2006 but just over $5,300 per patient in Hawaii. Long winters may take a toll on people, but seniors in New York are just not that much sicklier than those in Hawaii. (You can click here to check out how Medicare spending in you area stacks up.) For more than 20 years, the Dartmouth Atlas Project has been documenting such regional variations, and their new analysis of Medicare spending between 1992 and 2006, published this week in the New England Journal of Medicine, once again illustrates the point, for anyone who still needs convincing, that more healthcare doesn't necessarily result in better health.
The authors make the case that differences in spending growth exist largely because doctors' treatment decisions are influenced by such local conditions as the availability of hospital beds, imaging centers, and the like. So, for example, a patient suffering from mild pneumonia might be admitted to the hospital in a city where there are lots of available beds, whereas he might be sent home to recuperate if he lives somewhere where hospitals beds are scarce. Another contributor: The healthcare system rewards doctors more for seeing patients and for performing procedures than for actually improving patients' health.
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Obama Budget Squeezes Medicare—and Wealthier Seniors
Tweet Share on Facebook February 26, 2009 Comment (33)President Obama's budget proposal to create a $634 billion fund to finance healthcare reform stomps on plenty of special interest toes. One target group: Some seniors may experience unwelcome changes to their healthcare benefits and costs.
Wealthy individuals earning more than $85,000 would reportedly be asked to shell out higher premiums for their Medicare drug coverage starting in 2011, a change that would affect about 2.3 million of the roughly 45 million Medicare enrollees. In addition, the budget proposal would halt the higher payments that the government gives insurers who cover Medicare beneficiaries through private Medicare Advantage plans. That would undoubtedly mean higher premiums and reduced benefits for some of the 10 million or so beneficiaries enrolled in such plans.
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Stimulus Bill to Cover 65 Percent of COBRA Costs for 9 Months
Tweet Share on Facebook February 13, 2009 Comment (214)The economic stimulus bill that the House and Senate are expected to vote on today will do precious little to ensure that people who've lost their jobs can get the healthcare they need. During earlier debate, a number of proposals were floated that were aimed at low-income and older workers. One would have allowed low-income workers who lost their jobs to apply for Medicaid if their jobs didn't offer health insurance. Another would have let laid off workers ages 55 and older keep their employer health coverage under COBRA for longer than the usual 18 months.
Neither of those proposals made it into the final compromise bill, zeroed out amid worries that once a benefit is extended to a particular group it won't ever be pulled back. Former Medicaid recipients in many cash-strapped states can attest that entitlements are not, in fact, forever. So can all the workers who've seen their 401(k) employer match nixed this year. But no matter. It's a predictable objection that gets trotted out regularly.
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4 Strategies to Reduce the Cost of Cancer Care
Tweet Share on Facebook February 6, 2009 Comment (11)Cancer is one of the most common diseases, and one of the most costly to treat. If you get it—and 1 in 3 women and half of all men will—you'd like to feel confident that having health insurance will ensure that you get the care you need without too much financial pain. But as a new report documents, our private health insurance system is riddled with holes that force many patients either to forgo or delay care or to rack up huge bills that put them and their families in financial jeopardy. I went looking for ways to mitigate the problems, and found precious few. This is no surprise; if there were easy, affordable solutions, there would be no need for this report.
"Spending to Survive: Cancer Patients Confront Holes in the Health Insurance System" is a report produced jointly by the American Cancer Society and the Kaiser Family Foundation. It describes the difficulties encountered by 20 cancer patients who had private health insurance and who should, by all rights, have been able to count on their health plans to cover most, if not all, of their care. It didn't work out that way. They ran into caps on coverage and bumped up against lifetime benefit limits. Their cancer forced them to quit working, but they couldn't afford to continue their former employers' coverage under COBRA. And so on. The specifics varied, but the outcome was often the same: treatment glitches and a mountain of debt to join the weight of worry they already faced over their health.
