Health Reform - How Can Employers Help Fix Health Care?

In today's Wall Street Journal, Clayton Christensen and Jason Hwang, co-authors of "The Innovator's Prescription: A Disruptive Solution for Health Care" discuss how they think company CEOs can help change health care. They offer three specific strategies:

We recommend executives make one or more of three innovative changes: 1) encourage employees to use nurse-staffed in-store health clinics for common ailments, 2) partner with integrated health systems like Kaiser Permanente, and 3) set up company-run clinics at corporate offices and plants.

The article can be found here.

Health Care Reform - How to Finance It?

The Kaiser Family Foundation's Health Reform Gateway has released an issue brief on the options available to finance health care reform.

From KFF:

One of the key challenges in enacting a health care reform plan is how to finance it among government, employers, and individuals. Of particular concern to policymakers is what effect a health reform plan would have on government spending and the federal budget. President Obama and Congressional leaders have said that any health reform plan should not add to the budget deficit over a 10 year period.

This brief explains the likely sources of added costs under reform, the types of financing measures being considered, and some of the key questions likely to be addressed by how a plan is financed. It is part of a series of briefs providing an overview of key issues and concepts related to health reform.

The brief can be found here.

Goodbye to ERISA?

In Monday's Wall Street Journal, an opinion article on the Tri-Committee House health reform bill discusses the possible fate of ERISA pre-emption for employer-based health benefits.

Check out the article here.

Kaiser Poll Finds Majority of Public Support Health Reform

July's Kaiser Health Tracking Poll finds that the majority of the public support reforming America's health care system, although it is softening.

The Kaiser Family Foundation's (KFF) press release reads that:

As has been the case over the past ten months, a majority of the American people (56%) continue to believe that health reform is more important than ever despite the country's economic problems, and the public believes by a two to one margin (51% versus 23%) that the country will be better rather than worse off if Congress and the president enact health reform. More Americans think they and their family will be better off (39%) than worse off (21%) if legislation passes, with roughly a third (32%) believing it will make no difference for them or their family.

The complete poll, with charts and other analyses, can be found on the KFF site.

Consumer Checkbook Releases Report of Patients' Experiences with Doctors

Washington, D.C.-based Consumer Checkbook/Center for the Study of Services, a non-profit consumer organization, today released ratings and reports on hundreds of individual doctors in Memphis, TN; Denver, CO; and Kansas City, MO. Major national health plans Aetna, Cigna, and UnitedHealthcare participated along with regional health plan leaders Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas City as well as BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee.

The reports on doctors are available free to the public at a CHECKBOOK website (www.checkbook.org/patientcentral) and also through the website of a healthcare coalition in each metro area—the Kansas City Quality Improvement Consortium, the Colorado Business Group on Health, and (in the near future) Healthy Memphis Common Table.

A Public Plan for Connecticut

As reported by the Hartford Courant, yesterday the Democrat-controlled Connecticut state legislature overturned seven vetoes by Connecticut Governor M. Jodi Rell to take the first step in establishing universal health care in the state. Vetoing what she saw as a program too costly (claiming that costs could run as high as $1 billion a year), Gov. Rell did win a smaller victory when the controversial health care "pooling" bill failed to pass in the state Senate. The universal health care program is set to launch in 2012 and details of it will be crafted by a state board.

The story from the Hartford Courant can be found here. And, the story from the WSJ can be found here.

Accredited Office-Based Surgery Practices in New York State

The New York State Department of Health (NYS DOH) has launched a web portal that lists, by county, accredited office-based surgery practices. According to the NYS DOH website:

"Effective July 14, 2009, physician offices that perform surgical or invasive procedures using more than mild sedation must be accredited by one of these agencies:

• Accreditation Association for Ambulatory Health Care (AAAHC)
• American Association for Accreditation of Ambulatory Surgery Facilities, Inc. (AAAASF)
• The Joint Commission (TJC) "
  

The website can be found here.

Value Based Benefit Design: A Research Agenda

The National Business Coalition on Health (NBCH), NYBGH's national umbrella organization, in partnership with AHRQ recently released a white paper borne out of a value-based benefit design research agenda workshop held in November, 2008. Outlining recommendations from the multi-stakeholder group, it includes and highlights the growing emergence of value-based benefit design (VBBD) as a means of encouraging appropriate health care choices by consumers and providers. Moreover, it presents VBBD's evidence base and a discussion of practical implementation of VBBD as well as consumer perspectives. The white paper can be found here and is in PDF format.

Health Care Reform - Senate Committee Clears Bill

Today, a Senate panel voted, 13-10 and along party line, to approve the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pension Committee's health care bill. This comes only days after President Barack Obama urged Congress to quicken their pace with pushing through health reform. Reports can be found at the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times websites.

Health Care Reform - House Democrats Release a Plan

Yesterday, House Democrats released their proposal for sweeping health reform. The bill includes higher taxes on the rich, expands coverage, and penalizes all but the tiniest employers. Main points of the bill include:

• A tax surcharge ranging from 1% to 5.4% for individuals making over $280,000/yr and families making over $350,000/yr

• Employers not providing insurance to workers will have to pay a fee - equal to 8% of wages for an employers with an annual payroll over $400,000/yr - to the government to subsidize coverage. Employers with annual payrolls greater than $250,000 but less than $400,000 will pay a smaller fee.
  

• Has the potential to reduce the rolls of uninsured by 37 million, leaving approximately 17 million still uninsured

A copy of the bill can be found here.

The WSJ article can be found here and the New York Times article can be found here.

Health Care Reform - The Tax Debate

Central to the current health reform debate is the question of how to finance it. One proposal on the table is to tax, for the first time ever, health benefits provided by employers. In the last week, vocal and fierce opposition to this idea has surfaced. To better understand the issue in context, Health Affairs recently released a Health Policy Brief in which the authors describe the arguments for and against this plan. Find the article here.

Two Sides to Every (Health Care Reform) Debate

In this past Sunday's New York Times, the op-ed section focused on health care reform and how there are two sides to each equation. The articles are written by experts in the field and include Jonathan Gruber and Paul Ginsburg, among others. Their writing focuses on three topics: taxing health benefits, defensive medicine, and trimming hospital/health care costs. The article can be found here. The introduction from the Times:

President Obama has pledged to reform health care, but overhauling the system to offer every person in the United States coverage is no easy task. Op-Ed editors asked experts for advice on how to lower health care costs and pay for comprehensive coverage.

CMS Hospital Compare Website Revised

CMS has recently revised its Hospital Compare website to now report readmission and mortality data. The Web site now includes information on how frequently patients return to a hospital after being discharged, a possible indicator of how well the facility did the first time around. The site is www.hospitalcompare.hhs.gov.

WSJ - Support Slips for Tax on Employee Health Benefits

Today's Wall Street Journal reports that Senators on the Finance Committee are cooling on the idea of taxing employee health benefits for the first time ever. The idea is unpopular with many voters, although the idea is not being completely swept off the table. To finance reform, the Committee is now looking at taxing the wealthy - or limiting tax deductions - to help subsidize expanded coverage. The article can be found here.

HR Policy Association Comprehensive Health Care Reform Packet

The HR Policy Association now has a page devoted to comprehensive health reform from an HR professional perspective. This site gives HR professionals up-to-date resources for information on the health reform debate while also showcasing the Association's own efforts in affecting reform. The page includes policy briefs and memoranda; summaries of the Congressional reform proposals; letters to Congress/Administration; HR Policy Association hearing testimony; legislative/regulatory history; press releases; and other useful information.

The page can be found on the HR Policy Association website.

EBRI 2009 Health Confidence Survey

As part of their monthly issue brief series, the Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI) released The 2009 Health Confidence Survey: Public Opinion on Health Reform Varies; Strong Support for Insurance Market Reform and Public Plan Option, Mixed Response to Tax Cap.

Find the article here.

Laurel Pickering in the Wall Street Journal

An article in yesterday's Wall Street Journal quotes Laurel Pickering, NYBGH's Executive Director, as she participated last week in a roundtable hosted by the Foundation for Art & Healing. The article showcases how art can help people heal and can be found here. Convening thought leaders from the medical, academic, public health, arts, and business communities, the Arts and the Heart Campaign roundtable was held to explore the relationships between creative expression and healing while also discussing how greater recognition and practice of the concept can happen. Some of the other roundtable participants included Robert Butler, MD, the founder of the International Longevity Center; Steven Safyer, MD, CEO of Montefiore Medical Center; and Edward Hirsch, a poet and the President of the Guggenheim Foundation.

Health Care Reform - Issue Comparisons

As the House and Senate release and mark-up their bills for health reform, one can easily lose track of who's proposing what. The Kaiser Family Foundation and the RAND Corporation have created useful and easy-to-use health reform issue comparison tools and publications on their websites to help sift through the debate.

Kaiser: http://healthreform.kff.org/
RAND: http://www.randcompare.org/