Obamacare's Double Digit 2016 Rate Hikes

In Missouri, Coventry has asked for a 23 percent Obamacare rate hike next year:

Insurance brokers had considered the health plans sold by the Maryland-based insurer to be among the cheapest with the most extensive provider networks available to Missouri consumers.
But Coventry’s strategy appears to have caught up with it, and the insurer is now asking federal regulators to approve an average rate increase of 23 percent for plans sold in the St. Louis area. (Jordan Shapiro, “Coventry Health Care seeks double-digit price hike for health plans,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, June 2, 2015)

But, hey, if I posted every article about eye-popping rate hikes in Obamacare exchanges next year, we’d have room for nothing else on this blog for the next few weeks. So, I’ll leave it to my Forbes colleague and Obamacare fan, Bruce Japsen, to roll up the whole story.

Read the entire entry at NCPA's Health Policy Blog.

The Human Face of Medicaid's Poverty Trap

NCPA has long recommended a universal, refundable tax credit to replace welfare programs that impose effectively high marginal income tax rates on their dependents. A story from Chicago shows the human cost of Medicaid’s poverty trap.

Read the entire entry at NCPA's Health Policy Blog.

Drug Shortages Getting Worse

According to the Wall Street Journal, the shortage of critical cancer drugs is getting worse. The U.S. government’s measures to mitigate this problem have failed because it has ignored NCPA’s conclusion that shortages result from too much, not too little control over the market for these drugs.

The government keeps tightening the screws on manufacturers, and the shortages keep growing. See Devon Herrick’s testimony to the U.S. Senate in 2011 and my own study published in 2012.

Read the entire entry at NCPA's Health Policy Blog.

Paying for Mammograms: We're Thinking About it All Wrong

The third rail of American health policy is women’s health care.  The U.S. Department of Labor states that women make 80 percent of health care decisions for their families, although this appears to be derived from folklore rather than scholarly research. Nevertheless, any politician knows that the way to drive up polling numbers among women is to dial up the rhetoric on health care.

Back in 1996, Hillary Clinton, bitter after the defeat of HillaryCare, campaigned against “drive-by deliveries,” demanding that a federal law should be passed mandating that health insurers pay for mothers to stay in hospital for at least 48 hours after delivery. The campaign succeeded quickly: The Newborns’ and Mothers’ Health Protection Act passed that year, and took effect in 1998. It mandated a 48-hour stay (or 96 hours for Caesarian section). Although, doctors are free to discharge their patients earlier.

More recently, controversy arose when the Affordable Care Act was being debated, because it was being jammed through Congress just as women were struggling with a 2009 decision by the US Preventive Services Task Force to change its guidelines recommending annual mammograms. The new guidelines recommended screening starting at 50 years, not 40 (as previously recommended).

Needless to say, this upset many people. The American Cancer Society maintained its recommendation that preventive screening start at 40, as did the Mayo Clinic. Politicians took note, and made an exception in Obamacare for mammograms, such that the 2009 USPSTF revision was ignored when it came to Obamacare’s “free” preventive care.

Read the entire column at Forbes.

Health Construction Spending Lags

In response to some comments about the role of health facilities construction in the economy, I’ve decided to add a few lines about today’s construction spending report from the U.S. Census Bureau.

Year on year, total construction spending increased by 4.8 percent through April, to just over one trillion dollars, of which about 40 billion dollars (four percent) was health facilities construction. Health construction spending grew only 2.6 percent, much less than all construction and the 9.2 percent growth in nonresidential non-health construction.

Read the entire entry at NCPA's Health Policy Blog.

Health Insurance Consolidation Begins With A Bang

Just last Thursday, I wrote about the forthcoming consolidation in U.S. health insurance. My thesis was that only large, centralized, politically powerful insurers could continue to thrive.

With perfect timing, Humana, Inc., announced on Friday that it was putting itself on the block, and the shares rallied about twenty percent. They continue to climb today.

Read the entire entry at NCPA's Health Policy Blog.

Obamacare Patients Had Lower Drug Spending Than Patients in Employer Plans

A scholarly study of data from America’s largest pharmacy benefits manager concludes that Obamacare beneficiaries had lower drug spending than people in employer-based plans.

These are startling findings, and even contrary to earlier releases from Express Scripts itself. It does not seem consistent with emerging evidence that insurers are jacking up their Obamacare rates for 2016 because of higher than expected claims experience.

Read the entire entry at NCPA's Health Policy Blog.