Latest California Healthline Stories
Employer System a Shaky Base for Health Reform
The health care overhaul built on the nation’s unique employer-based health insurance system, instead of revamping the model. However, a number of recent shocks to the system are creating new challenges for consumers and raising concerns ahead of coverage expansions in 2014.
California First With Exchange, but What Will It Look Like?
So far, there are more questions than answers about how California’s proposed Health Benefits Exchange would work. The goal is to pool risk and give the state — and its citizens — more buying power, which may mean lower premium rates and a wider array of choices in health plans.
Single Payer Goes Quietly Into That Last Night
All night long, Assembly watchers waited and wondered: When would the bill be presented to vote on establishing a single payer health system?
The answer was: Not this night. Not in this legislative session.
Political insiders sat around and wondered why Assembly speaker John Perez decided not to present a vote on SB 810 by Mark Leno (D-San Francisco), which had been passed in the legislature twice before, and vetoed twice before by Governor Schwarzenegger.
Should Insurers Raise Rates Whenever They Want?
Health insurers typically raise rates when customers reach a higher age bracket. It’s pretty simple, according to John Lovell of the California Association of Health Underwriters.
“The way premiums are raised is age brackets of 5 or 10 years,” Lovell said. “I always talk to my clients in the year they’re going to get a rate increase. The amount it goes up is just a trend — I notify my clients so they’re not surprised. It cuts down on the rate shock.”
But California policymakers have a different kind of rate shock in mind. The shock of two rate hikes in a year.
Legislature Approves Health Care Bills
The days are dwindling down to a precious few. By next Tuesday, the state legislature must approve or reject all the bills on its docket.
That means it has three more days to vote.
Many bills have passed this week, but several high-profile bills are still hanging, and expected to be heard and voted on today.
Health Plan Pooling Bill Moves to Governor’s Desk
This week’s approval by the state legislature of the creation of a statewide health benefit exchange would eventually result in competition between health plans in the exchange.
A bill passed yesterday is designed to help public health plans compete more robustly with the larger private health plans, by allowing public plans to pool risk and share networks for the joint offering of health plans.
The idea of SB 56, by Sen. Elaine Alquist (D-Santa Clara) is to ensure competition and make a broader array of affordable plans available, according to John Ramey, the executive director of Local Health Plans of California.
Exchange ‘Could Look Like a Large Business’
The two bills that would establish the statewide Health Insurance Benefits Exchange have not been without controversy.
In an Assembly floor vote Friday, several Republican members rose in opposition to the bill — which, in these last hurried days of bill-passing before the Aug. 31 recess, is an extremely rare event.
“I don’t believe we need the state government running a benefits exchange,” Jim Silva (R-Huntington Beach) said. “Besides, this is something we don’t need to take action on till 2014 … and I think there are much better ways than a new exchange.”
New Rules Requiring Health Insurers To Offer Preventive Services May Help Remove Barriers
Ned Calonge of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, Tom Hubbard of the New England Healthcare Institute and Jerry Kominski of UCLA’s School of Public Health discussed the new rules with California Healthline.
Temporary High-Risk Pool Welcome, Needed
The federally funded high-risk health insurance pool, one of the first major pieces of national health care reform to come into existence, is apparently more welcome — and needed — in California than it is in other parts of the country.
When the Managed Risk Medical Insurance Board — the state agency in charge of California’s pool — announced premium rates and the companies that would be handling the program last week, state officials said they already have received 4,000 requests for applications.
In the 21 states where the federal government is handling the high risk pool, the combined total of applicants so far is 2,400.
Riverside Lobbying for Raise in State Health Care Funding
Health care and government officials in Riverside County want to adjust state reimbursement rates they say are inadequate and creating a crisis in health care access. The county has the second-lowest state reimbursement rate for health care services in California.