Worried About Costs And Unaware of Help, Californians Head Into New Era of Health Coverage

Today's post was shared by Kaiser Health News and comes from www.kaiserhealthnews.org

As uninsured Californians head into a new era of health coverage, they're worried about costs and unaware of the help they'll get from the government, a new survey finds. The survey, by the Kaiser Family Foundation, found that three out of four Californians who earn modest incomes and could buy government-subsidized private coverage believe, wrongly, that they're not eligible for federal assistance or they simply don't know if they qualify. In addition, many undocumented immigrants, who comprise about a fifth of the state's uninsured population, erroneously believe they will be eligible for coverage. The law specifically bars them from getting coverage from the state's new health insurance exchange, which opens Oct. 1, for coverage beginning Jan.1, 2014. "This has been, for so long, a political debate," said Anthony Wright, executive director of Health Access, a Sacramento-based consumer advocacy group. "We're just starting to move it into a practical reality. Now that the benefits are close at hand, there is a concerted effort to educate people about what their benefits are." California is one of two dozen states preparing to dramatically expand Medicaid, the federal-state insurance program for the poor, yet the survey found only half of newly eligible low-income Californians presume they will qualify. The nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation surveyed some 2,000 uninsured Californians from mid-July until the end of August, a summertime lull before a burst of...

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Hacking the Affordable Care Act

Workers' Compensation is really "married" to the Affordable Care Act (AFA). As that law is modified so will workers' compensation medical delivery. Today's post was shared by The Health Care Blog and comes from thehealthcareblog.com

By ROGER COLLIER It may say something about expectations for the Affordable Care Act that the simplistic “just repeal Obamacare” cries of Congressional Republicans are starting to be supplemented by proposals for its replacement. The most detailed so far is from the conservative American Enterprise Institute, which has published an unexpectedly non-doctrinaire study authored by Harvard professor Michael Chernew and seven other respected academics. It’s far from perfect, but it’s worth reading. Structural details of the AEI proposal, modestly titled “Best of Both Worlds,” aren’t always clear (page 1 lists four “principles,” page 5 lists five “priorities”, and page 16 lists three “major planks”), but it does attempt a bipartisan approach, combining ideas from left and right. Some of these ideas have been contained in other proposals, such as those of Wyden and Bennett and Fuchs and Emanuel (which may damn the AEI proposal in right-wing eyes), and most recently in a THCB piece by Martin Gaynor. They include the elimination of the employer coverage tax preference, the provision of “premium support” subsidies for most individuals, and the establishment of a national insurance exchange. Together, they are designed to encourage individual choice and responsibility and to maximize competition between insurers, while removing some of the inequities of the present system (and of the ACA). The AEI...

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