Latest California Healthline Stories
Exchanging Challenges in Health Plan Marketplace
While California is poised to emerge as a health reform leader with a new health insurance exchange, the state — like many — still faces numerous challenges over the exchange’s operation.
The best thing that happened to health insurance rate regulation was the last thing its proponents wanted to see.
When Anthem Blue Cross announced it planned to raise individual rates by as much as 39% back in February, it was the type of steep rate hike regulation proponents had been warning against for many months.
The public scorn and outrage prompted by that rate hike proposal was insurance regulation’s best friend — but, it turned out, was not enough to propel legislation.
California Set To Insure High-Risk Patients
On April 29, Governor Schwarzenegger signed legislation that established the state’s federally funded high-risk insurance pool. This week that insurance pool is accepting its first enrollee applications.
That means the government set up a complicated government program in about four months. In state bureaucracy terms, that is the blink of an eye.
“We’ve been working nights and weekends trying to make this happen,” Deputy Director for Legislative and External Affairs at the Managed Risk Medical Insurance Board Jeanie Esajian said.
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.”