The Affordable Care Act is meant to bring insurance to nearly everyone, but it excludes one major group: undocumented immigrants. Yet the cost of care for these immigrants will not be going away. It will simply continue to be hidden in the cost of everyone’s insurance and in our tax bills. And that cost might actually be higher because undocumented immigrants will remain without a source of dependable care.
Author: California Health Report
Consumption of sugary drinks among adolescents has increased by 8 percent even as younger children consumer fewer of the beverages, a new study has found. Only 19 percent of 2- to 5-year-olds drink a sugary beverage daily, according to the study which was based on interviews with 40,000 California households by the California Health Interview Survey. That’s a 30 percent decline from the last such
Jerry Schumacher’s Fullerton-based engineering firm seems like the perfect example of what President Obama would like to see from American business when it comes to health care. The company offers coverage to all of its full-time employees, and pays 100 percent of the monthly premium. But Schumacher still lives in fear of the Affordable Care Act, the federal health insurance reform known widely as “Obamacare.” He thinks it can only make things tougher on him. With fewer than 50 employees, Schumacher isn’t affected by the law. And even if the company payroll grows and surpasses that threshold, the most the federal law would require of Schumacher is to do what he does now voluntarily: provide affordable coverage for his workers. Still, he’s worried. “Obamacare is just another way of taxing people,” he says. “It’s another thing that squashes the small guy, and even the medium-size employer.” Schumacher is not alone. Small business owners across California and around the country are struggling to understand what federal health reform means for them, its benefits and its burdens.
Nearly 1 million Californians have visited a new online insurance marketplace that is the centerpiece of the federal health reform known as the Affordable Care Act, officials say. Of those visitors between Oct. 1 and Oct. 5, about 16,000 completed the eligibility process, and with family members, they represented about 28,000 consumers. But officials with Covered California, the state-run and federally funded agency that created and manages the marketplace, couldn’t say how many of those people will actually buy insurance. At this point the system takes consumers through the eligibility process but does not ask them for payment; they will be billed by the insurance company they choose. And those bills probably won’t go out until mid-November for policies that take effect Jan. 1. “The train has left the station,” said Peter Lee, executive director of Covered California. “These are big numbers and they are proof of pent-up demand.” Lee acknowledged that consumers who logged into the system or called the agency’s 800-number in the first few days faced long wait times and many of them probably gave up. But he said by week’s end the waits for telephone help were down to an average of four minutes, and the agency’s goal is to serve everyone within 30 seconds.
Community clinics – the backbone of California’s health care safety net – face a whipsaw from the Affordable Care Act. On the one hand, the law opens the state’s free health program for the poor, Medi-Cal, to more than a million Californians who don’t have insurance today. This should mean a big increase in business for the clinics, a rush they might struggle to accommodate. But the ACA also makes private insurance available to the working poor, many of whom have depended on the clinics for their care until now. These people will now have other options.
The Affordable Care Act promises to bring insurance to millions of Californians who don’t have it now. But will it bring them health care?
The biggest winners from the federal health reform known as the Affordable Care Act will probably be older adults who are too young to be eligible for Medicare.
The people who designed the Affordable Care Act employed an “If we build it” strategy reminiscent of the Field of Dreams, the classic 1989 film about an iconic baseball diamond built in an Iowa cornfield. If they built a more accessible health insurance system, the reasoning in Congress went, consumers would come and use it.
But will they?
In less than 30 days, California’s new online health insurance market is scheduled to open for business when Covered California throws the switch on a web site designed to allow consumers to shop for coverage and obtain subsidies in the form of tax credits from the federal government. Oct. 1 2013 has been circled on the calendar of health insurance reformers since shortly after Congress passed President Obama’s Affordable Care Act more than three years ago. The state has spent hundreds of millions of dollars building the web site and the back-office connections to allow the system to communicate with a federal database to check the details in a consumer’s application. More than a million Californians who don’t get insurance through their job are expected to use the new marketplace in the first year. But as of now, state officials will say only that they expect the system to allow consumers to begin their applications online on Oct. 1. What happens then?
For millions of Californians who buy health insurance on their own – and even for many who get it through work – the Affordable Care Act will change almost everything about the experience. The federal health reform law completely upends the business model of private insurance companies, changing their incentives and, very likely, the way they deal with customers. Under current law, which goes away on Jan. 1, insurance companies make money by minimizing their risk, and they do that by screening out potential customers who might actually need the product the insurance companies are selling. Using questionnaires and detailed interviews about a person’s medical history, insurers decide who is most likely to get sick. If you are one of those people, you will probably not be offered coverage. If you do get a chance to buy a policy, it will be priced at a level you will almost certainly not find affordable. But in a few months that will no longer be the case.