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This is one of a number of blogs that will appear on my daughter.  I call her Kitty.  She is a wonderfully talented, bright, and empathetic individual in her late ‘20s.  She and I agreed I would write this series to impart how important health coverage is. Not only is her decision to have surgery courageous, but so is her decision to share her journey through me. The principal reason to share the journey is because we both want to explain what many average Americans go through financially when they have major operations and do not have the best insurance or no insurance at all.  My daughter is privileged to come from a well-off family and to have consistent and robust insurance.  This will mean that she will pay a tiny amount for a surgery with a sticker price in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.  But for uninsured and

A few readers have written in and asked if I could explain the various value-based-care (VBC) payment and arrangement frameworks. Specifically, they asked about my references to global and partial risk funds for providers.  Here is my best effort to explain what I see as the two overall types of VBC payments/arrangements we see in the marketplace today. Purpose VBC payments are meant to move from the fee-for-service (FFS) transactional payment system to one driven by efficiency and quality.  What do I mean by transaction payments? For the past many decades, most payments in our healthcare system were made as a fee for each service transacted in the healthcare system.  That can be the case when we go to the primary care physician (PCP), where he or she will be paid a fee by the insurer for the visit as well as other services provided. Similarly, a specialist may be

My latest blogs have touched upon the fact that while Medicare Advantage (MA) continues to grow, MA plans in the program are facing a number of financial challenges: While MA plans prepared for the worse, the advanced notice of MA payments for 2025 could very well compound the problem, even with increased enrollment – which is robust and driven by the clear difference between the value of MA vs. the traditional fee-for-service (FFS) program. It will remain that way. See my last blog on all this: https://www.healthcarelabyrinth.com/with-boom-over-will-medicare-advantage-collapse-or-adjust/ So let’s take a look at the advanced 2025 MA rate notice. Controversy over calculations Each year there is a robust debate on how to even calculate what the year over year increases will be in MA. It revolves around risk score trends. Risk scores tend to inflate each year in the program. MA plans would argue risk scores predict the costs of

After I posted my last blog Thursday ( https://www.healthcarelabyrinth.com/with-medical-expense-rising-what-are-health-plans-to-do/ ) and people digested what was happening with insurers’ stocks last week, a number of readers contacted me asking me to opine further on what was happening in MA. Many asked: “Is the Medicare boom over and is Medicare Advantage (MA) somehow collapsing under the weight of growing medical expense and government regulations?” They told me that they read many articles that implied MA was done — kaput! Indeed, my blogs have struck an alarmist cord at times about what is happening in MA, while other times I continue to extol the value and continued success of MA. So what’s up? It is a fair question and impression after the MA news over the past few weeks. Indeed, I give you a mixed review on MA on this site for good reasons. Refresh on issues Let’s refresh a bit on that