A Variety of Health Insurance News Pieces

Welcome to this installment of the Weekly Health Insurance News Roundup. This week, rather than having a central theme, I came across a few articles that, while not having the same theme, were interesting enough to share here. Our first article comes from The Washington Post, and is somewhat grim. Entitled, “Newborn Hospital Deaths Highest for Those Without Insurance,” the article discusses newborns — especially those who don’t have health insurance through their parents — are the majority of children who die while being cared for in a hospital. This was also true of children transferred to multiple hospitals rather than those who remained in one.

The finding reports that these infants may require end-of-life care and services that most hospitals simply can’t provide. The figures of these deaths are somewhat startling. The child mortality rate for those without health insurance was 0.58 percent in 2002, according to the study released by the Journal of Hospital Medicine. This is compared to 0.45 percent for children covered under Medicare and 0.33 percent of children covered by private insurance. While these numbers might seem small on the whole, these are tragic numbers that show another reason why we need more comprehensive and possibly universal health care coverage.

Speaking of which, our next article deals with the subject of health care reform and the hurdles we may face as a result. Entitled, “CBO Says Health Care Overhaul Will Be Significant Challenge,” this article in CQ Politics discusses two reports recently released by the Congressional Budget Office that discuss the hurdles we face financially in regards to health care reform, as well as several ways the health care and health insurance can save costs over the next several years in order to bring health care costs down. According to the CBO, health care spending will take up 17 percent of our Gross Domestic Product, or GDP, in 2009, and will rise to 20 percent by 2017. This is, honestly, a ridiculously high amount that should be curtailed as quickly as possible.

The article goes into how the reports give suggestions on how to curb health care spending in the long run using things such as health information technology and preventive care, to inform patients and prevent chronic illnesses. These strategies would save costs, but more needs to be done. Other options presented by these reports including changing the tax code to help control costs, which could save over $450 billion over ten years. Apparently, they think the real cost problem isn’t insuring everyone, it’s the costs of the actual health care itself, which is rising every year. This is a pretty interesting article that has a lot of good information, so I suggesting taking a look at the two CBO reports,
Key Issues in Analyzing Major Health Insurance Proposals and Budget Options, Volume 1: Health Care.

Our final article comes from The Wall Street Journal and is entitled, “Medicare Plans Draw Criticism on Drug Pricing.” In this article, they discuss how an obscure drug-pricing system could forcer older citizens to pay stiff fines if they go for brand name drugs rather than generic drugs. According to the article, the plan known as Medicare Plan D includes “reference-based pricing,” which means that those under this plan will pay much higher prices for brand name drugs, which is typically the difference plus the generic and the brand name price, plus a co-pay. Sadly, which drugs are covered by this isn’t fully explained by Medicare, which is leading to confusion by many of its customers under this plan. Lawmakers and advocate groups such as the AARP are concerned about this plan that could cause customers to pay more out-of-pocket expenses than they either expected or can handle. Hopefully they will be able to untangle the situation and make it clear and concise for everyone involved.

This concludes this entry in the Weekly Health Insurance News Roundup. As always, I hope you have found it educational, informative and interesting, and wish you a happy and healthy day.

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