June 2010

Instant Billing Long Overdue

by Louise June 30, 2010

I have often thought that an instant billing/payment system for medical offices (sort of a Visa/Mastercard type of setup between providers and health insurance carriers) was long-overdue. This New York Times article details exactly how such a system could work, but also addresses some of the problems it would face. The main issue is the complicated nature of health insurance billing, with thousands of medical codes that the doctor’s office has to sort through in order to correctly submit a bill. [...]

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Colorado Delaying Medicaid Payments

by Louise June 28, 2010

[...] And that means that Medicaid claims submitted over the last couple weeks won’t be paid until July 9th – providers will miss out on payments that were scheduled for last week and later this week. The 2011 fiscal year begins in July, and the state is planning to push Medicaid reimbursements out in order to contain the budget for this year. The money will eventually be paid to the providers, but for book-keeping purposes it will be in a different fiscal year, and it also amounts to an interest-free short term loan from the providers to the state. [...]

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Colorado Governor Ritter At Odds With Attorney General Suthers

by Louise June 24, 2010

Colorado is an interesting place to be this summer, as the health care reform debate continues to play out – in the courts now, rather than in town halls and legislative sessions. Our Attorney General, Republican John Suthers, is part of the group of AGs from 20 states who are challenging the legality of a federal mandate requiring people to have health insurance. And our Governor, Bill Ritter Jr., is one of four Democratic governors of those states who disagree with the position taken by the Attorneys General. [...]

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Early Retiree Reinsurance Program Application Available From HHS

by Louise June 22, 2010

[...] There are an estimated 62,700 people in Colorado who retired before they were eligible for Medicare and are receiving retiree health care benefits from their former employers. Their employers can now apply for financial assistance to help cover the cost of health care for their early retirees, and the financial assistance can be passed along to the retirees in the form of lower health care costs.

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IRS 2011 HSA Contribution Funding Limits

by Jay June 20, 2010

The IRS has just issued Revenue Procedure 2010-22, which outlines the 2011 cost-of-living contribution and coverage adjustments for HSAs, as mandated under Code Section 223(g). The limits for 2011 are unchanged from 2010.
HDHP Minimum Deductible:
You must still have coverage under an HSA-qualified “high deductible health insurance plan” (HDHP) to open and contribute to an HSA. Federal law still requires that in 2011 the health insurance deductible be at least [...]

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Barbara Bush Believes Health Care Is A Right

by Louise June 18, 2010

[...] People who can least afford to pay large sums of money out of pocket for health care are the ones most likely to have to do so. Medicaid is there for the lowest income earners, but some states are very restrictive in terms of income levels required to qualify for Medicaid. Colorado has started to expand access to Medicaid and Child Health Plan Plus (CHP+) but this is not the case in all states. And people on the lower end of the income spectrum are far more likely to be uninsured than those on the higher end. [...]

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Health Insurance Carriers Continuing To Improve

by Louise June 16, 2010

A year ago I wrote an article about how health insurance companies were generally doing a better job in 2008 of paying claims faster and denying fewer claims than they did in 2007. The annual Athena Health study results are now out for 2009, and overall there was another significant increase in the speed with which health insurance companies paid claims (7 days faster than in 2008) and a decline among most payers in terms of the percentage of claims denied. [...]

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Radiation Exposure From Medical Testing

by Louise June 15, 2010

I just read a rather alarming article about the dramatic increase in radiation exposure from medical tests over the last couple decades. We get more medical radiation than people in any other country – in fact, half of the world’s advanced imaging procedures that use radiation are done in the US. And the average American’s radiation exposure from medical testing has grown sixfold in the last twenty years. [...]

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Fair Pay For Our Doctors

by Louise June 14, 2010

[...] The PCP shortage is likely to become even more of a problem once the health care reform provisions kick in and millions of currently uninsured Americans become insured and presumably start to seek out more health care. Unless we can make primary care more attractive to people in medical school, all of those newly insured people are going to end up seeing expensive specialists instead of PCPs, and the burden of paying for health care will only become harder to bear.

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