Health Savings Accounts, Speaking Spanish, and Insurance Fraud
Welcome to this edition of the Weekly Health Insurance News Roundup. In this edition, we look at a few varying articles covering several different topics, but articles I thought were interesting enough to be included. Our first article comes to us from Forbes, and is entitled, "Health savings accounts expand as care costs rise." In this article, author Eileen AJ Connelly discusses the apparent boom in the number of individuals and families enrolled in health savings accounts, or HSA's.
In 2008, according to the article, 6,100,000 people had health savings accounts as opposed to around 430,000 in 2004 when the program was born. More and people are using health savings accounts not only to take more control over their health care spending and savings, but because they allow people to save in years wherein they have fewer health care expenses. These accounts can also accumulate interest when not used as well. HSA account holders over 55 can also make increased payments until Medicare kicks in at age 65. With the high cost of health care these days, there are a good amount of plusses to health savings accounts.
The article notes, however, that there are some minuses as well. The most notable is the high deductibles that go along with health savings accounts, which means customers will pay more out of their own pockets before their insurance kicks in to cover the rest. This means that those with a lot of medical expenses might not want to get health savings accounts, but rather more traditional plans due to the lower deductibles. This is one of the reasons that around half of those individuals eligible to enroll in HSA's have not chosen to do so. Personally, I think health savings accounts are a great alternative to those looking for something other than traditional health insurance policies, but there are pro's and con's to each type of coverage.
Our next article comes from U.S. News & World Report, and is entitled, "Speaking Spanish Limits Access to Health Care." Author Steven Reinberg first cites a recently released study from the University of North Carolina in which the researchers stated "the U.S. Spanish-speaking adult population represents a particularly vulnerable subset of U.S. Hispanics, with far worse access to the health-care system." The study stated that many Hispanics who spoke less than "very good" English lagged in use of preventive health-care services and more than half of these Hispanics lacked health insurance entirely due to cost.
Experts, however, cite that the actual problem is not language, but poverty. "It is a bit unfortunate that the authors of this piece choose to create the impression that language was a causal factor in receiving less care or lower quality of care," said William Vega, a professor of family medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles. According to Vega, a "disproportionate percentage of Latino immigrant families are also in poverty, which is the real impediment to receipt of medical care of adequate quality." While both parties argue the real cause of the lack of quality health care within the Hispanic community, both agree that this points to the need for real reform in our health care and health insurance systems.
Our final article, entitled, "Staten Island University Hospital to pay over $88M in insurance fraud settlements," the article discusses how fraudulent use of rooms and services many years ago at Staten Island University Hospital resulted in millions of dollars of fraudulent insurance bills. According to the article, Staten Island University Hospital overcharged Medicaid, Medicare and TRICARE -- a health insurance program for those in the military -- for improper treatment of patients in non-licensed beds.
The settlement is the largest paid by a hospital in a health care fraud case in history, and comes on top of an already-agreed-upon settlement for overcharging Medicare for similar practices. Several of the illegal activities were reported by internal whistleblowers, while others were found after an investigation of the facility itself. Since people within the hospital itself reported discrepancies, however, the damages and liability put upon the hospital itself were limited. Hopefully this will show other hospitals not to overcharge already strained health insurance programs.
This concludes this edition of the Weekly Health Insurance News Roundup. I hope you have found these tidbits interesting and informative, and thank you for reading. Have a happy and healthy day, and we'll see you next time.
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