Health insurance in the United States has a structural history of indemnity insurance. The philosophical underpinning is that health insurance should be sufficient to pay for the activities and procedures that get a worker back on his feet and back to work after an accident or unexpected illness. It aims to intervene in short bursts …
Young adults and their parents
Ronnie Pudding in comments last night asked a good question: Aren’t most of those young people covered by their parents’ plans? The keeping a young adult on a parent’s group policy is a middle and upper middle class policy sweetner. It is not a comprehensive policy to actually address access to insurance among those who can’t …
The cheap and the young
Gallup has some recent polling on PPACA/Obamacare approval by age bucket. Below is their graph with my comments: If the young adults like Obamacare and follow-up that liking with enrollment, the actuaries are very happy. And if the old folks who don’t like Obamacare but have not gotten to Medicare yet don’t sign up …
Interfacing is a PITA
Josh Marshall at TPM has been having a series of very interesting outside experts write in on what they see as Healthcare.gov problems. I think a few recent posts are hitting a highly probable failure point and an explanation as to why the state built and run exchanges are running better on average than the …
Spectrum of consolidation
There are numerous ways to organize a health insurance comapny. One of the easier ways to classify how an insurance company operates is to map out how much an insurance company acts like a a mini-National Health Service. Each organizational model has its own value proposition and comparative advantage, but this country is moving from one end of …
No is Nice
The big problem in American health care besides not producing good results is that everything costs too damn much because no one is able or willing to say no. Evidence based medicine, pay for performance, reference pricing, narrow and multi-tiered networks are all attempts at introducing soft “No’s” into the equation but there are extraordinarily …
Whats in a number
President Obama’s press conference this afternoon threw out a series of numbers concerning interest in subsidized health insurance on the Exchanges. What do these numbers actually mean from an insurer’s perspective? So far, the national website, HealthCare.gov, has been visited nearly 20 million times. Twenty million times. This means very little. For comparison’s sake, Balloon …