Improving Access to Health Care While Keeping Health Insurance Affordable through Reform: Is it Possible?
Hello, and welcome to this installment of the Weekly Health Insurance News Roundup. Since it's all over the news about health care lately, we'll be focusing on some stories involving reform, whether it's for health care or health insurance in this installment, and probably for the foreseeable future since it's bombarding the news. In this installment we will look at two articles that go along with our title. The first article is entitled, "Insurance reform could improve access to care", and comes to us from the Houston Chronicle.
The article, authored by Doctor Victor Levin, talks about his tenure as a cancer physician and researcher, and how he's seen care, and access to it, degrade over the years. Medicine becomes more expensive; fewer doctors accept coverage from government programs like Medicare due to low payments; insurance policies fail to cover certain treatments, labeling them, "experimental," when they could be monumentally beneficial to a patient's health and well being. These are just some examples Doctor Levin cites as problems of our broken system.
In turn, he has some ideas which sound fairly reasonable. Some of these include: age brackets wherein insurers cannot limit coverage based on a prior condition; establish a three-tiered system wherein cost and coverage is based on elements of the coverage itself rather than prior conditions; develop transparent rules for "experimental" treatments and their reimbursement; establish clear federal guidelines on health insurance companies in order to eliminate costly state oversight, and so on.
These ideas could be good building blocks for a comprehensive and complete health insurance and health care system for everyone in this country. Will it happen? It's of course debatable, and of course it's being hotly debated in congress, the white house, town hall meetings, in the press, and anywhere else someone has an opinion.
Another article on similar lines comes to us from the San Francisco Chronicle and is entitled, "Yes, we can pay for health care reform - here's how". In this article, author Alain Enthoven lists four ideas (the A, B, C, D as he calls it) that would have to happen in order to make health care reform -- and the insurance we all need to get it -- affordable. These include creating a health insurance exchange to widen the pool so that everyone would pay, but doing so would keep insurance affordable; offer tax-benefits that would help save billions of dollars and keep health insurance affordable; widen Medicare to a similar system that covers more people such as government workers, which would bring in more money and, in turn, create more savings.
These ideas are all well and good, but will they be enacted into actual policies that will bring about the reform everyone agrees that we need? We'll keep checking back on this topic as we hopefully get closer to a resolution.
