Friday, September 20, 2013
What is a cost variance?
#Obamacare Clark Howard did a great job answering questions about the new #health care laws
Understanding #Obamacare: Bronze, Silver, Gold and Platinum
It's less than two weeks before the state online marketplaces open for business as part of the Affordable Care Act, widely known as Obamacare. Have you decided which level of health insurance you're going to buy? Your choices are bronze, silver, gold and platinum.
As the names suggest, bronze has the cheapest premiums and, as a result, the highest out-of-pocket costs among the four plans. On the other end, platinum has the highest premiums and the lowest out-of-pocket costs for health care.
How do you decide? Money Talks News founder Stacy Johnson explains more about your choices in the following video. Check it, then read on for more details about the plans.
Thursday, September 19, 2013
What is an expense?
What HHS Didn’t Tell You about Obamacare’s “Coverage”
Newscom
This week, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) released a report claiming that health coverage may cost less than $100 per month for many of the uninsured. However, the HHS study left out a few key details.
First, more than half of those who will pay less than $100 per month according to HHS will do so because they will be placed into the Medicaid program.
Medicaid provides "coverage" only in the loosest sense of the term. Low reimbursements discourage many doctors from participating, and it's difficult for many beneficiaries to find someone who will accept their "coverage"—leading some to call a Medicaid card a "hunting license…a chance to go try and find a doctor." Even participants in the program have said Medicaid is not "real insurance," precisely because they can't find physicians to treat them.
Second, even those who do receive coverage on Obamacare's exchanges will receive "coverage" very similar to Medicaid—in other words, plans that offer few choices when it comes to picking a doctor. Recent reports have highlighted that insurance companies are restricting patient choices for many exchange plans, raising concerns about whether some exchange plans will have enough in-network doctors to cover their patients. Some health insurers have admitted that their exchange plans will "look a lot like the Medicaid plans that we are currently administering"—a statement that should not be reassuring to potential insurance shoppers.
There are other methodological problems with the HHS study. For instance, the report extrapolated premium numbers based on early estimates to date; it's possible that these premium rates could be unrepresentative of the country as a whole. More importantly, when it comes to HHS's definition of "coverage," and whether that health plan will provide quality care, it's caveat emptor: Buyer beware.
The post What HHS Didn't Tell You about Obamacare's "Coverage" appeared first on The Foundry: Conservative Policy News Blog from