Category: Insurance

Health Insurance, Veterinary Care, and the Not-So-Secret Benefits of Pets

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By Shailin Thomas

Pet ownership is incredibly popular in the United States. There are almost 70 million companion dogs spread across 43 million American households.   This isn’t particularly surprising, given that study after study has shown that companion animals promote healthier, happier, longer lives for their owners. Despite pet popularity and prevalence, though, many pet owners don’t fully understand how expensive their four-legged family members can be — especially if they end up needing extensive veterinary care. Every year, millions of companion animals are euthanized because their owners lack the financial resources to pay for necessary veterinary services. Unlike in human medicine, pets in the hospital with readily curable ailments often go untreated for financial reasons.

How can we help people keep and care for their pets — capturing companion animal health benefits while also ensuring those pets receive the veterinary care they need? The answer might be found in the synergies between animal and human health — and the benefits they entail for health insurance providers.

The health benefits of companion animals have been extensively documented in both the scientific literature and the mainstream media. Pet owners have, inter alia, decreased risk of cardiovascular disease, decreased risk of anxiety and depression, decreased incidence of allergies, and increased immune system function. Some insurance companies even have materials for their customers promoting pet ownership because of these benefits. The health conditions ameliorated by animal companionship are often otherwise treated with doctor’s visits, medications, and other expensive interventions paid for in large part by insurance providers. In other words, pet ownership produces positive externalities on insurance providers by decreasing the amount they pay in traditional medical services for these ailments — and insurance companies have an interest in incentivizing animal companionship.

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Ambulances are Monopolies — and They Should Be Regulated Accordingly

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By Shailin Thomas

You go to your local urgent care with a headache and a fever, and the doctor suggests a trip to the hospital for further evaluation — just to make sure there isn’t anything serious causing your symptoms. She offers an ambulance, and you accept. You could probably walk or Uber, but you’re not feeling well, and the doctor has offered to arrange the ride. Why not?

This was the story of Joanne Freedman. She didn’t think too much about it, until she received a $900 bill for the two-block ambulance ride she took to the hospital. While Joanne’s experience was particularly egregious, it is not wholly uncommon. Ambulance pricing is one of the most variable and least transparent components of health care costs, with rides ranging from tens to thousands of dollars. This is in part because there are many ambulance providers, and they all have different relationships with different insurance companies. It’s also in part because ambulance rates are generally set according to the services the ambulance is equipped to provide, not necessarily the services actually provided. Some ambulance companies have contracts with municipalities that make them the only game in town, while others are in more diverse markets with multiple providers competing for patients. All this combines to create an incredibly complex industry with very little consistency from ambulance to ambulance.

But is this disjointed, free-market system the best way to structure emergency transportation? The arguments underlying the justification of a free, unregulated market hinge on the ability of consumers to police the industry through choice. If the seller of a good sets the price too high, consumers will buy from a different seller until she brings the price down to what consumers are willing to pay.  This is, in theory, what allows markets to find the right prices for goods and services more efficiently than any government agency or regulator ever could. Read More

The Evolving Crisis of the ACA Exchange Marketplace

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By Zack Buck

Following news last week that Aetna was pulling out of health care insurance exchange markets in eleven states, Pinal County, Arizona became the epicenter in the rapidly evolving and growing crisis facing the Affordable Care Act’s insurance exchanges.  Sandwiched between Phoenix and Tucson, Pinal County is home to about 400,000 residents, but no insurance companies; in short, Pinal County has been left without any insurance companies signed up to sell insurance on the exchange to its residents for 2017—becoming the “county that Obamacare forgot.”

Pinal County had nearly 10,000 citizens sign up on the exchange in 2016, but Aetna’s departure bookends a rough period for Pinal County residents.  In addition to Aetna, the county has recently endured the departure of UnitedHealth Group, Humana, and a non-profit co-op from Arizona’s exchange.  As a result, Pinal County is reportedly looking to other insurers who may be interested in selling on the exchange to its residents; in a bit of hopeful news, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Arizona is said to be “re-evaluating where it will offer plans next year.”

But the crisis isn’t contained to Pinal County.  Two states—Tennessee and Alaska—have been trying to avoid a similar fate.

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Income-Scaling of Cost-Sharing Gains Traction

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By Christopher Robertson

With 148,000 members, the American College of Physicians (ACP) is the largest medical-speciality organization.  This summer, its board released a new report on the growing financial burdens faced by patients who enjoy health insurance but are nonetheless exposed to unbearably large costs for healthcare.  At the end of the day, cost-sharing is just the absence of insurance for those costs.

ACP calls for a range of reforms, including “income-adjusted cost-sharing approaches that reduce or directly subsidize the expected out-of-pocket contribution of lower-income workers to avoid creating a barrier to their obtaining needed care.”  As I have argued, the Affordable Care Act includes income-based subsidies for cost-sharing in the Marketplaces, but these are currently being challenged in court, and do not apply to the employer-based system or Medicare, which together cover the vast majority of patients.

Hillary Clinton has also advanced a plan to create progressive refundable tax credits for people who spend more than 5% of their income out-of-pocket.   The advantage of such a tax-based approach is that it reaches patients regardless of where they get their insurance (except for Medicare, which is excluded).  The disadvantage is that it leaves people in a state of financial insecurity until they get their refunds.  A better approach would scale cost-sharing exposure in the first place, a power that I have suggested is already available under Federal law and which is self-funding.

Our Current Pharmaceutical Payment System Isn’t Neutral

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By Rachel Sachs

Last week, former Pfizer Global R&D head John LaMattina wrote another of his columns for Forbes, this one on the subject of pay-for-performance deals for pharmaceuticals.  These deals, in which insurers contract with pharmaceutical companies to pay for drugs based on how well they perform in practice, are becoming more common as the public conversation over drug prices escalates (examples here, here, and here).  There are many interesting questions around pay-for-performance deals, but LaMattina closes his column with a focus on one: their impact on the direction of pharmaceutical R&D.

Specifically, LaMattina argues: “Biopharmaceutical companies will closely watch how pay-for-performance evolves. Should payers become overly enthralled with rebates and continue to raise the bar, companies could move their R&D efforts into areas where a drug’s impact can be easily defined and measured. In such an environment, therapeutic areas like depression and obesity could give way to diseases like psoriasis or rare diseases where patient advocacy remains strong. In its efforts to rein in costs, payers might unwittingly force R&D out of areas where new drugs are still needed. That would be unfortunate.”

LaMattina is exactly right in one sense – and highly misleading in another.  First, underlying LaMattina’s argument is a critical claim that the way in which drugs are paid for affects the types of drugs that are developed.  This is absolutely right.  Although it may be perfectly obvious to some, as someone who just wrote a 25,000 word article on this very topic (oh hi, SSRN), I can attest that recognition of this idea is too often absent from the legal literature.  We largely focus on prescription drug insurance and payment as a way to encourage access to medications that already exist, but we ignore its effects on the types of drugs that are produced in the first place.

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Healthcare complaints matter: the need to improve the system

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By John Tingle

Today consumerism is an essential part of the fabric of British society and complaint systems are heralded in many retail and professional environments. The British public have got used to complaining over the years and this attitude has seeped into the provision of health care services.

Records levels of complaints about the National Health Service (NHS) can be seen to be made every year but the NHS just does not seem to be able to get to grips with developing a good patient complaints handling system.

The Health Service Ombudsman (HSO) lies at the top of the NHS complaints structure and makes the final decisions on complaints that have not be resolved by the NHS in England. The HSO has looked into the quality of NHS complaint investigations where serious or avoidable harm has been alleged.Systemic failings in complaint, patient safety investigations were revealed. Failures which unsurprisingly have appeared in numerous complaints reports over the years before.

For the report, the HSO reviewed 150 NHS complaint investigations where avoidable harm or death was alleged. The HSO also spoke to six different trusts and surveyed over 170 NHS complaint managers to gain insights. An advisory group was later convened by the HSO to test findings.

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TWIHL Special: Wendy Mariner Analyzes the New Wellness Regulations

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By Nicolas Terry and Frank Pasquale

twihl 5x5A special TWIHL episode with analysis of the new EEOC regulations under the ADA and GINA on Employer Wellness Plans. Nic is joined by Professor Wendy Mariner. Professor Mariner is the Edward R. Utley Professor of Health Law at Boston University School of Public Health, Professor of Law at Boston University School of Law, Professor at Boston University School of Medicine, and Co-Director of the J.D.-M.P.H. joint degree program, and a member of the faculty of the Center for Health Law, Ethics and Human Rights at BUSPH. Professor Mariner’s research focuses on laws governing health risks, including social and personal responsibility for risk creation, health insurance systems, implementation of the Affordable Care Act, ERISA, health information privacy, and population health policy.

Our discussion concentrated on the ADA regulation and examined how the agency responded to comments (including ours), the concept of voluntariness, the status of EEOC v. Flambeau, Inc., data protection (including issues raised when  employers research the health of their employees), and the policy flaws in the wellness space.The Week in Health Law Podcast from Frank Pasquale and Nicolas Terry is a commuting-length discussion about some of the more thorny issues in Health Law & Policy.

Subscribe at iTunes, listen at Stitcher Radio, Tunein and Podbean, or search for The Week in Health Law in your favorite podcast app. Show notes and more are at TWIHL.com. If you have comments, an idea for a show or a topic to discuss you can find us on twitter @nicolasterry @FrankPasquale @WeekInHealthLaw

How Not to Debate Health Care Reform

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Editor’s Note: This post was originally published on May 12 with portions of the essay missing. The corrected text is below.

By Ted Marmor

Presidential campaigns in the United States are not typically fought over competing manifestos, with policy details set out in reasonably clear language. Rather they are disputes among candidates about the state of the country and what values—or aspirational visions—they endorse.  And, for at least a century, most American debates about health care reform have been dominated by ideological slogans, misleading claims about financing, and mystifying labels. Republicans have exemplified the mystification this year, repeatedly mislabeling Obamacare as socialized medicine and falsely claiming it a “takeover of American medicine.”

In fairness, the Democratic primaries have generated their own version of mystification. The two candidates do agree on the goals of universal health insurance. But clarity ends there. The Clinton campaign has emphasized incremental reform possibilities and criticized Senator Sanders’ proposal of Medicare for All as unrealistic. Sanders, by contrast, has offered a compelling conception of a fairer and less expensive version of what Americans want, but no incremental steps to get to it.

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Elizabeth Sepper on ‘The Week in Health Law’ Podcast

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By Nicolas Terry and Frank Pasquale

 

This week we interviewed Elizabeth Sepper, Associatetwihl 5x5 Professor of Law at Washington University. Elizabeth’s work explores the interaction of morality, professional ethics, and law in health care and insurance. She has written extensively on conscientious refusals to provide reproductive and end-of-life healthcare In recent work, Elizabeth has argued that, in resisting compliance with antidiscrimination laws, pharmacy regulations, and insurance mandates (most prominently, the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive mandate), businesses make claims more reminiscent of market libertarianism than of religious freedom.

Our conversation covered many aspects of conscience claims by contemporary health providers. Our timing was perfect, since HHS just finalized a rule on one of Elizabeth’s areas of expertise: prohibitions on discrimination based on race, color, national origin, sex, age or disability. Elizabeth weighed in on the rule and its implications for the future of health care.

The Week in Health Law Podcast from Frank Pasquale and Nicolas Terry is a commuting-length discussion about some of the more thorny issues in Health Law & Policy. Subscribe at iTunes, listen at Stitcher Radio, Tunein and Podbean, or search for The Week in Health Law in your favorite podcast app. Show notes and more are at TWIHL.com. If you have comments, an idea for a show or a topic to discuss you can find us on twitter @nicolasterry @FrankPasquale @WeekInHealthLaw

The Unintended Uninsured: The Affordable Care Act’s Coverage Gap

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[Cross posted from the Harvard Law and Policy Review]

By Julian Polaris

This is a golden age for access to healthcare in America. In 2015, over 90% of Americans had health coverage, the highest insurance ratein the 50 years the federal government has collected insurance data. This astonishing progress is due in large part to the Affordable Care Act (ACA): President Obama recently announced that 20 million people are covered thanks to the ACA. The victory is bittersweet, however: had the ACA been implemented as designed, an additional three million people would have insurance today. This is the story of the “coverage gap,” a crack in the ACA created by the Supreme Court and left unrepaired in nineteen states. A crack so wide that three million low-income people have fallen through it.

The ACA, as originally passed, aimed to increase access to health coverage in two main ways. First, the Act expanded Medicaid, the public health plan for people with low income. Previously, most states had limited Medicaid eligibility to specific groups like children and pregnant women. The ACA enlarged and standardized the Medicaid program to cover all people who earn up to 138% of the federal poverty level (FPL). The federal government picks up 90% of the cost of healthcare services for newly eligible beneficiaries, whereas costs in traditional Medicaid are split closer to 50-50.

Second, the ACA established the health insurance “exchanges,” portals in each state where consumers can shop for standardized plans that aren’t tied to a particular employer. Federal tax credits are available to subsidize exchange coverage for those earning 100 to 400% of the FPL. Read More