Are insurance policies too complicated to understand? They always have been and always will be unless there are changes in the way policies work, or until there are rules to make it easier for buyers to compare options.
Healthcare Regulation and Reform
The Food and Drug Administration will review a long-delayed petition calling for the voluntary addition of folic acid to corn masa to prevent neural-tube defects such as those seen in Washington’s cluster.
A complaint filed this week alleges that California is engaging in unlawful discrimination by paying some of the lowest reimbursement rates in the country to the state’s Medicaid providers. As some coverage pointed out, the notion that low rates are limiting access to doctors is “not unfounded."
Cohen recently gave California fellows a master class in how to approach public records. In her talk, Cohen stressed the level of pre-reporting that needs to be done before filing a request. Here are a few key takeaways.
The health insurance marketplaces offer consumers a multitude of options, but sorting out which plan bests suit their needs can be a slog. That’s especially true when it comes to figuring out whether a particular doctor is part of a plan’s network, since the directories are famously unreliable.
Notions of personal failure and our collective ignorance of what it’s like to live on $8.60 a day help explain why 20 states have not covered the very poorest, and why Medicaid as we know it could disappear.
Starting in 2007, California’s hospital administrative penalties program was designed to bring greater accountability to hospitals that commit “never events” and put patients in immediate jeopardy. So, what does the data tell us about how well it's working?
The rising prevalence of "narrow" health insurance networks has set off alarms. But do such networks keep patients from getting good care? Not necessarily. The more relevant question is whether a provider network is adequate or not.
Can you buy health care like computers? For years, health policy gurus, employers and entrepreneurs have argued you could. But growing evidence tells us that the focus on turning patients into shoppers has real limits.
On Monday, Montana became the 30th state to expand Medicaid. On Tuesday, election results cast Kentucky's Medicaid expansion into doubt. What does this all have to do with kids' health? When it comes to children's health insurance, a state's Medicaid status can make a big difference.