New data show eight out of 10 Hoosiers with private health insurance are covered by employer plans that are exempt from most Obamacare rules. So, rather than being an invasive train wreck, Obamacare may fail because it doesn’t affect enough people.
Brose McVey is leading a new health care clinic company that is squarely aimed at helping individuals, the self-employed and even large businesses deal with the new health care reality that is emerging under Obamacare.
When the next enrollment season opens for the Obamacare exchange in Indiana, more than half the “health insurers” will actually be doctors and hospitals.
While the biggest hospital profit margins are made in the suburbs, the biggest pile of cash—$353 million in 2012—is made at the three downtown campuses run by Indiana University Health. In fact, those hospitals generated 32 percent of all operating gains posted by central Indiana hospitals in 2012.
Indiana ranks 10th in the nation for the highest spending on health care and 10th in the nation for the number of adults missing six or more teeth. That’s not a coincidence. Hoosiers do a poor job of taking care of themselves, and we end up paying for it in higher taxes and health insurance premiums.
Getting everyone into the same room prior to surgeries is cutting costs and improving health.
Gov. Pence's HIP 2.0 plan is nothing less than an attempt to roll back liberal policy on low-income health benefits as far as currently possible–and to get other states to follow suit. It might even be an opening bid for president.
Fees on hospitals will generate the lion’s share of the funds for Gov. Mike Pence’s Healthy Indiana Plan expansion. But the benefits hospitals will receive will outweigh those costs.
Now that Indianapolis-area hospitals employ large numbers of physicians, a new study suggests the integrated health systems will be able to charge higher prices to private health insurers.
On the eve of Obamacare, almost no central Indiana hospitals were having trouble making money. Hip replacements, heart surgery and Hamilton County were the biggest drivers of profits.
Hospitals, which have forced orthopedic implant makers to lower their prices in recent years, may have a harder time doing so when the combined Zimmer-Biomet controls nearly 40 percent of the market.
When I predicted on March 13 that Obamacare would fail to expand individual private insurance coverage in Indiana, I was completely off. It now looks like an extra 30,000 Hoosiers have bought individual health insurance this year.
The Accountable Care Consortium was envisioned as a vehicle through which the hospitals would eventually funnel all of their roughly $2.5 billion in annual contracts with health insurers and employers.
Until doctors and hospitals make a whole lot more headway—or, perhaps, more accurately, are allowed to make more headway—in offering package deals, it’s hard to see major progress on containing out-of-control health care costs.
New tests have helped Roche Diagnostics grow its North American revenue, excluding its troubled diabetes care business, 23 percent over the past five years. But the money for diagnostic tests continues to go down in key areas, noted CFO Wayne Burris.
The typical hospital around the country will see its profits wiped out entirely by the changes coming from health reform and the aging of the population. But in Indianapolis, the hits will be cushioned by this region's fatter commercial reimbursements.
Indianapolis hospitals have begun to offer joint replacement surgeries to employers and insurers using “bundled prices.” That means, instead of billing piecemeal for each individual service and supply, the hospitals wrap everything needed from just before to just after surgery into a package deal.
Indiana is the most profitable state for Indianapolis-based WellPoint Inc., which operates Blue Cross and Blue Shield health plans in 14 states. WellPoint’s margin for Indiana in 2012 was 5.8 percent, 38 percent higher than WellPoint’s national average.
Still to be announced is what share of those 8 million enrollees were previously uninsured, and how many actually secured coverage by paying their first month’s premiums.
WellPoint’s commanding market share gave it a whopping $129 million in profit from its risk-based insurance products in 2012. But in percentage terms, WellPoint was not at the top of the heap.
