RSSTHURSDAY, Sept. 23 (HealthDay News) -- Thursday marks the six-month anniversary of enactment of the sweeping U.S. health reform legislation, and the day that a number of key provisions of the law begin to take effect.
President Barack Obama signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act on March 23. The law will expand health insurance access to 94 percent of non-elderly Americans by 2019 and, in the interim, provides Americans with many new rights and protections
New Health Reforms Take Effect
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Your Health Plan After Reform
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This may feel like just another open enrollment season, one more anxious check of the coverage offered by your employer to see how much benefits have been trimmed and the financial pain heightened. [For help, consult America's Best Health Insurance Plans and our plan-picking tips.] But before long, at least the worry that vital coverage will be lopped off could end. After health reform, a few years from now, nearly all Americans would be required to have coverage—at a minimum, a "qualified" health plan, designed to Uncle Sam's specifications and providing a core of comprehensive protection.
Is a Cash-Only or Direct-Pay Medical Practice for You?
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For seven years, 48-year-old Anne Akers-Smith of Annandale, Va., has been taking her family to a doctor who demands cash in full for service—no insurance. And she likes it that way. "It's a lot more practical and a lot less expensive," Akers-Smith says of DocTalker Family Medicine in Vienna, Va. The office is part of a growing movement toward cash-only medical practices, which do away with third-party billing and waiting for reimbursement and put responsibility for payment squarely on the patient. Cash-only, or direct-pay, medical practices cater to the uninsured and people like Akers-Smith with high-deductible health plans that kick in for major expenditures. Across the country, there are now 500 to 1,000 family medicine practices operating on a cash-only model, estimates Ted Epperly, president of the American Academy of Family Physicians.
Credit Card Danger: Don’t Add Authorized Users
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Adding a user to your credit card account - no matter how much you trust him or her - can be a giant financial risk. Parents with college-age kids are considering this right now, since new laws prohibit banks from issuing cards to minorswithout a job (unless they get a co-signer).
While becoming an authorized user offers easy access to a credit card and can help establish a credit history, for the account holder it can be risky business. Take this unfortunate question I recently received from a reader earlier this month:
“I made the mistake of putting my boyfriend on my credit card accounts. He has managed to rack up a little over $30k in debt under my name. Although he is making the minimum payments each month, the balances are not going down and the payments are extremely high for each card. What is the best way to resolve this issue?”
Ugh. This scenario is precisely why adding an authorized user to your credit card account can be a bad idea. While this reader’s boyfriend racked up the debt, she is the only one legally liable for paying off that balance. That’s the catch with having an authorized user on your account. At least if the boyfriend was a joint account holder, they’d both be on the hook.
One way to resolve an authorized user gone awry is to now make a separate agreement with one another - signed and sealed - that says the authorized user will pay the account holder X amount of money each month to resolve this debt. You’ll want to make sure that X is above and beyond the monthly minimum.
Once that’s on track, see if you can get your boyfriend off the account. And in the future, see if your bank or card company will allow account holders to set limits on how much authorized users can spend. American Express, for example, began allowing spending limits on authorized user cards last year. This is especially key for parents want to keep their kids on a limited budget in college.
UnitedHealth Earnings
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“As Maine goes, so goes the nation” is a longtime axiom of American politics. If the second quarter results ofUnitedHealth Group (UNH), one of the two largest U.S. health insurers, forecast similar results for the industry as a whole, insurance companies are sitting on top of the world — at least for now.
For both the quarter ended June 30 and for the first half of the year,UnitedHealth’s revenues and profits were up nearly across the board. Overall in Q2, the company enjoyed a 31 increase in net income to $1.1 billion on revenues of $21.1 billion, up nearly 7 percent from the prior-year period. For the first half of 2010, volume rose 6 percent and net soared 20 percent.
The bulk of United’s revenue comes from its health benefits segment, which includes its insurance companies. The volume increases there were comparable to those of the group as a whole in Q2 and the first half, but the growth in operating income was spectacular. For the second quarter, the division’s operating earnings jumped 44 percent; for the first half, they were up 35 percent.
This is all the more remarkable in light of the fact that 75 percent of United’s insurance enrollment is in the commercial sector, which lost 440,000 members over the past year as people got laid off and lost their coverage. Nevertheless, United more than compensated for that loss by increasing its Medicaid and Medicare Advantagebusinesses. Medicaid enrollment grew by 16 percent while Medicare Advantage members increased by 17 percent. Also on the upswing were enrollment in United’s Medigap and Medicare drug plans and consumer-driven health plans, which drove an increase in the banking business of United’s OptumHealth division.
As one would expect, the major reason for the increase in United’s Medicaid revenues is the recession-fueled growth in Medicaid recipients. Cash-strapped states are relying heavily on Medicaid managed care plans to help them balance their budgets, and United is glad to oblige. Since 2002, the company has been rapidly expanding its presence in the Medicaid market, and the recent results show that this has been a wise move.
More puzzling is United’s rapid expansion of its Medicare Advantage plans. After all, with the Affordable Care Act poised to curtail government subsidies to this program, one might expect health plans to be trimming their sails in this area. But for companies like United and Humana, it’s still full speed ahead. Perhaps this is because there’s still good money to be made in Medicare Advantage, while the commercial business continues to falter.
One interesting sidelight to the commercial sector: Although enrollment in employer-provided plans shifted markedly from fully insured to self-insured plans from 2008 to the present, United says that the trend reversed in the second quarter of 2010. While the number of people in “fee-based” (i.e., self-insured) plans decreased by 25,000, the number of those in “risk-based” (fully insured) plans rose by 95,000. What that means isn’t clear, but it could indicate that big companies are shedding workers at a faster pace than small to medium-sized firms.
It will be interesting to see whether other companies’ second-quarter results match those of United. If that’s the case, however, it will not necessarily portend a turnaround in the insurance industry. It might just reflect an increasing emphasis on public-sector business that will be unsustainable in the long run.
California Health Insurance Companies
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Individual and Family Health Insurance Companies in California
- AARP Insured By Aetna
- Aetna
- Anthem Blue Cross
- Blue Shield of California
- CIGNA
- Celtic Ins. Co.
- Health Net
- Kaiser Permanente of CA
Dental Insurance Carriers in California
- Ameritas Life Insurance Corp.
- Anthem Blue Cross
- Bay Dental
- Blue Shield of California
- Everest Dental Plan
- Nationwide Life Insurance Company
- Security Life Insurance Company of America
- United Concordia Dental
- UnitedHealthcare
Short Term Insurance Providers in California
Arizona Insurance Companies
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Arizona health insurance providers
Individual and Family Health Insurance Companies in Arizona
AARP Insured By Aetna
Aetna
Blue Cross Blue Shield of Arizona
CIGNA
Celtic Ins. Co.
Companion Life Insurance Company
Health Net of Arizona
Humana
UnitedHealthcare
Dental Insurance Carriers in Arizona
Aetna
Ameritas Life Insurance Corp.
Bay Dental
Everest Dental Plan
Security Life Insurance Company of America
Total Dental Administrators Health Plan, Inc.
United Concordia Dental
UnitedHealthcare
Short Term Insurance Providers in Arizona
Assurant Health
Celtic Ins. Co.
HCC Life Insurance Company
SAS Insurance Development
Standard Security Life Insurance Company
UnitedHealthcare
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