If you want to know how the health care reform law affects you, Healthcare.gov is one of the best places to go. And now they’ve made it possible to look up coverage options for your situation and your location. Check it out:
Tags: health care, health care reform
We’ve already covered much of this, but a New York Times editorial sums it up:
Americans are already starting to see the benefits of health care reform. The new law requires health insurance companies — starting in September — to end their most indefensible practice: rescinding coverage after a policyholder gets sick. In recent days insurers and their trade association have rushed to announce that they will end rescissions immediately.
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The insurers were wise to short-circuit the criticisms and end rescissions now. This follows a recent agreement by many companies to start letting dependents stay on their parents’ policies until age 26, which isn’t required until September. Under pressure from the White House, the industry has also agreed to cover children with pre-existing medical conditions as soon as new rules are issued.
Many of the other major provisions of reform don’t kick in until 2014, but it is already changing the behavior of insurers. That means more security for many Americans who might otherwise find insurance unaffordable or unavailable.
Tags: health care reform
Good news for college seniors and their parents:
This year’s crop of college graduates may have trouble finding a job, given the state of the economy. But some of them will have a much easier time keeping health insurance while they look.
Insurance giant United HealthCare said it would implement, as of today, a requirement of the new health care law that allows young adults who are no longer full-time students to remain on their parent’s health plans until they reach the age of 26. WellPoint, too, announced it would do the same thing, effective June 1.
Since this provision of the new health care law doesn’t go into effect until September, this is significant:
United figures the change in policy could help at least 150,000 graduating seniors and their families from having to find temporary coverage between this spring and the time the new requirement becomes effective.
(This is an effective and meaningful move by United and Wellpoint. But insurance companies, by definition, still care more about profit than about your wellbeing.)
Tags: health care, health care reform
President Obama signed legislation that will dramatically change the federal student loan program.
The new law will eliminate fees paid to private banks to act as intermediaries in providing loans to college students and use much of the nearly $68 billion in savings over 11 years to expand Pell grants and make it easier for students to repay outstanding loans after graduating. The law also invests $2 billion in community colleges over the next four years to provide education and career training programs to workers eligible for trade adjustment aid after dislocation in their industries.
The law will increase Pell grants along with inflation in the next few years, which should raise the maximum grant to $5,975 from $5,550 by 2017, according to the White House, and it will also provide 820,000 more grants by 2020.
Eliminating the middle man (the banks) means more help will be available, which will ease the financial burden of families who want to send their kids to college. It also means that repayment terms are a little kinder:
Students who borrow money starting in July 2014 will be allowed to cap repayments at 10 percent of income above a basic living allowance, instead of 15 percent. Moreover, if they keep up payments, their balances will be forgiven after 20 years instead of 25 years — or after 10 years if they are in public service, like teaching, nursing or serving in the military.
A disability rights activist sent me a link to Disability Scoop:
When health insurance reform was signed into law just last week, Democratic lawmakers said that coverage of children with pre-existing conditions would be one of the most immediate effects. But within days, insurers argued a detailed reading of the new legislation allowed them to continue cutting-off kids with conditions like Down syndrome and cerebral palsy in certain circumstances until 2014.
The good news is - that insurance companies quickly thought the better of that. From The NY Times (same day):
“Health plans recognize the significant hardship that a family faces when they are unable to obtain coverage for a child with a pre-existing condition,” said Karen M. Ignagni, president of America’s Health Insurance Plans, a trade group. Accordingly, she said, “we await and will fully comply with” the rules.
Ms. Ignagni made the commitment in a letter to Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, who had said she feared that some insurers might exploit a possible ambiguity in the new health care law to deny coverage to some sick children.
Apparently it didn’t take any time at all for the insurance companies to realize that refusing to cover kids with Down Syndrome wasn’t a good PR move.
Tags: education, health care reform, health insurance reform, student loans
Another part of health care reform:
The Class Act, a legacy of Senator Edward M. Kennedy (whose widow and son were on hand for the signing), sets up the first national government-run long-term care insurance program, which will be offered primarily through employers.
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The Class Act does not require screening of applicants for health problems, so people who might not qualify for private long-term care insurance can enroll. Participants will pay monthly premiums; after a five-year vesting period, they receive benefits if they need care, whether they are 28-year-olds hurt in snowboard accidents or 88-year-olds with Parkinson’s disease.
You pay premiums, and after you’ve been doing that for years, if you get sick or injured, you get some help with your daily care, with tasks that will help people stay out of nursing homes.
Naturally, the private insurance industry is against this. They’d rather keep collecting high premiums from people with no other choices—surprise! According to the executive director of the American Association for Long-Term Care Insurance (i.e. a spokesman for private insurance):
“Inevitably, Class will morph into an entitlement program that’s a mandatory tax on all individuals,” he said. He calls it “Medicare Part E.”
By using the words “entitlement” and “mandatory tax,” this private insurer spokesman is trying to paint the program as inevitably unpopular. But “Medicare Part E” gets closer to the truth. Because Medicare is popular, remember? And if there’s one thing private insurers don’t want, it’s popular programs doing what they do without the uncertainty and abusive price hikes.
“Medicare Part E,” may sound scary to the insurance companies, but to most of us, it sounds pretty good.
Tags: Class Act, health care reform
When Nancy Pelosi said that, with the passage of health care reform, being a woman would no longer be a pre-existing condition, what did she mean?
The New York Times explains:
Until now, it has been perfectly legal in most states for companies selling individual health policies — for people who do not have group coverage through employers — to engage in “gender rating,” that is, charging women more than men for the same coverage, even for policies that do not include maternity care. The rationale was that women used the health care system more than men. But some companies charged women who did not smoke more than men who did, even though smokers have more risks. The differences in premiums, from 4 percent to 48 percent, according to a 2008 analysis by the law center, can add up to hundreds of dollars a year. The individual market is the one that many people turn to when they lose their jobs and their group coverage.
Insurers have also applied gender-rating to group coverage, but laws against sex discrimination in the workplace prevent employers from passing along the higher costs to their employees based on sex. Gender rating has taken a particular toll on smaller or midsize businesses with many women, like home-health care, child care and nonprofits. As a result, some businesses have been unable to offer health coverage or have been able to afford it only by using plans with very high deductibles.
In addition, individual policies often excluded maternity coverage, or charged much more for it. Now, gender rating is essentially outlawed, and policies must include maternity coverage, considered “an essential health benefit.”
It is breathtaking we lived under this system for so long, and that so many people were willing to fight change.
Tags: health care reform
And they’re off!
You didn’t have to be a cynic to think insurance companies would try to find loopholes in the health care fix. But I must confess, even I am a little surprised at their first stab at it. On the list of individual parts of the reform that would be hard for them, or for politicians pushing repeal, to take back, this one would rank pretty high.
Yup, the insurance companies went after kids. Specifically, they said that while the law said they couldn’t deny kids for having pre-existing conditions, they just didn’t have to sell insurance to the entire family of a sick child. No, really.
Insurance industry lawyer William Schiffbauer told the New York Times, “The fine print differs from the larger political message. If a company sells insurance, it will have to cover pre-existing conditions for children covered by the policy. But it does not have to sell to somebody with a pre-existing condition. And the insurer could increase premiums to cover the additional cost.’’
This did not go over so well with policymakers such as Nancy Pelosi and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.
And the insurance companies backed down. This time.
In a letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, the industry’s top lobbyist said insurers will accept new regulations to dispel uncertainty over a much-publicized guarantee that children with medical problems can get coverage starting this year.
Quick resolution of the doubts was a win for Obama — and a sign that the industry has no stomach for another war of words with a president who deftly used double-digit rate hikes by the companies to revive his sweeping health care legislation from near collapse in Congress.
“Health plans recognize the significant hardship that a family faces when they are unable to obtain coverage for a child with a pre-existing condition,” Karen Ignagni, president of America’s Health Insurance Plans, said in a letter to Sebelius. Ignagni said that the industry will “fully comply” with the regulations, expected within weeks.
Anyone have any bets on which provision the insurance companies will go after next?
Tags: health care reform, insurance companies, Kathleen Sebelius
One more vote, one more signature, and that’s it. We can stop talking about health care reform bills and start talking about health care reform laws.
The Senate on Thursday passed the reconciliation bill to amend the health care reforms recently signed into law, bringing the health care debate one step closer to an end.
The package of changes passed by a vote of 56 to 43 and now goes to the House for a final vote. The House will take up the measure this evening.
The House has the final vote because there were some minor wording changes to the Senate bill. (Those were on provisions relating to student loans, not to health care.) That vote, going on now, should not be in any doubt given that it isn’t substantively different than what they passed Sunday night.
Some Republicans, of course, want to campaign on repealing the bill. President Obama’s response:
“My attitude is, go for it!,” Obama told a cheering crowd in Iowa City, Iowa. “If they want to have that fight, we can have it!”
The president also said he doesn’t believe voters “are going to put the insurance industry back in the driver’s seat. We’ve already been there — we’re not going back!”
There are good reasons to want to have that fight. After all, since the House passed reform and President Obama signed it, the law has gotten more popular as people assess what’s actually in it.
And with key provisions going into effect before November’s elections, who’s really going to be campaigning on “I’ll pass a law that lets insurance companies deny kids with pre-existing conditions”? How about “I’ll reopen the Medicare Part D donut hole”?
It’s still going to be a fight, but right now, working people have beat the insurance companies.
Tags: health care reform
The Senate is currently working its way up to a vote on fixes to the health care reform bill. That, of course, involves working its way through a host of ridiculous amendments proposed by Republicans not so much to prevent the fixes as to just make everything difficult and time-consuming and to make the process feel as negative and horrible as possible. That is the strategy. It’s about flooding the media with their negative messages and about preventing anything else from getting done. But it can’t go on indefinitely, and mcjoan is already seeing signs that they’re “giving in to the inevitable–passage of this bill.”
In the mean time, the early responses to passage of reform are good. A Gallup poll found that people think it’s a good thing the bill was passed, 49% to 40%. A CBS poll that resurveyed people who had already been polled on health care reform found support five points higher than previously, though support still trails, 42% to 46%.
So it’s looking like a slog, and no doubt Senate Republicans and their allies on cable television will make it as painful as possible to get to the final vote for the reform bill fix. But we’re getting there.
Tags: health care reform
The health care reform bill has a lot of pieces. Some of them may affect you, others not. Some kick in this year, others phase in over a period of years. What effect the bill will have on any given person is a complicated question. Here are a few resources to find answers.
Remember that there is a long list of provisions that go into effect this year. Once the Senate passes the reconciliation bill already passed by the House, those include:
Included on that list are things that will help almost everyone. Like ending rescissions: now, if you’re insured you won’t have to worry that your insurance company will drop you the minute you get sick and really need the coverage. People graduating from college won’t have to worry that if it takes them some time to find a good job in this tough economy, they’ll lose their insurance—and their parents won’t have to worry, either. If you’re on Medicare and have a lot of prescription medications, the closing of the Part D donut hole will mean an awful lot to you. If you’re like me and you have good insurance, but you’ve found that it’s a lot easier to find just about any kind of specialist than it is to find a primary care doctor who’s taking patients, an increase in the number of primary care doctors is good news. If you’ve had a major illness or accident that ran up big bills once in your life, you’ll know how important the lifting of lifetime caps and restrictive annual limits is. And so on.
Ok, so those are some widespread effects. But what about you specifically?
The Washington Post walks you through it with a tool that asks about your current insurance status, your household size, income, and marital status and then tells you what will change. Will you be eligible for a new kind of insurance? Will the costs be subsidized? Will your taxes rise?
And finally (for now), this is instructive:
Tags: health care reform
