Confusion, Reform and the Future of Health Insurance and Health Care
Welcome to this installment of the Weekly Health Insurance News Roundup. In this issue, I found three interesting stories regarding confusion in health care and health insurance, what might be needed to bring much-needed reform to health care, as well as its future in this country.
The first article we'll look at is called "Consumers face confusion when picking health plans," and comes to us from the Associated Press. This article discusses how education is needed of consumers to grasp the different types of terms, plans, costs and so on involved with health insurance. Since health insurance is becoming more and more important to our every day lives, making informed decisions about our health care and health insurance needs becomes more and more important.
This article gives the definitions of basic terms such as coinsurance and co-payment, as well as discusses what various organizations are doing to help improve our knowledge of health insurance. For example, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality has put together a 36-page guide together called "Questions and Answers about Health Insurance" (available at their website) that helps educate customers on health insurance. While there are efforts to gain traction in this arena, the article suggests more needs to be done to make consumers fully educated on the health insurance they're paying for.
The next article comes to us from MarketWatch and is entitled, "Debating what's fair, affordable in health insurance." This article looks at two key areas of reform that will be needed to make progress in changing our health insurance system for the better. The first area is "individual variance," as the article terms it. The article details how most people aren't aware of how affordable health insurance can be, and therefore don't pursue it. The higher cost of health insurance for women is also problematic, according to the article, especially since they receive fewer benefits. According to the article, they suggest insurers drop gender-based ratings and pricings.
The other area that needs to be addressed, according to the article, is uninsured children. Children, especially in lower and lower-middle income families are finding it harder and harder to acquire and retain quality health insurance. While there has been resistance in expanding the government's SCHIP program to insure children in the past -- due to worries that people would leave private health insurance companies for this so-called "public" health insurance -- studies are showing that it's actually the high cost of health insurance that's driving people out of private insurance, and this is leaving many families and children uninsured. While the article offers no real solutions, I think it's basically just trying to make us aware of the problems rather than give answers.
Our final article comes from Workforce Management magazine and is entitled, "Future of Nation's Health Care May Take Its Cue From Massachusetts." This article discusses how the Massachusetts mandated health insurance laws might serve as a benchmark or template for upcoming health care reform in the Obama presidency, even though president-elect Obama has made no mention of laws mandating health insurance, which is a key portion of the Massachusetts reform package. Whichever way Obama chooses to go on the matter, challenges and consequences will result that could change the way this country handles health care and health insurance. It will be interesting to see where this goes in the coming months and years.
This concludes our usual installment of the Weekly Health Insurance News Roundup. As always, I hope you've found it informative, interesting and useful. Have a safe, happy, and healthy day.
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