vbc

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

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

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has reported one of those weird conundrums in healthcare when it outlined expected cost increases in Medicare and Medicaid for 2024.  The CBO said that Medicare is expected to shoot up dramatically just as Medicaid expenditures will drop considerably as well. How is that possible? Let’s dig in here. Medicare The CBO says that Medicare spending will increase by about $65 billion in 2024 to $865 billion.  That is an increase of about 8%.  The significant rise in expected Medicare costs is driven by a few different things: In the outyears, outlays for Medicare will equal 3.2 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2025 and increase to 4.2 percent of GDP in 2034. Medicaid On the flip side, the CBO says Medicaid expenditures will decrease by $58 billion to $557 billion.  This is a drop of about 9%.  The reason for this drop is driven by

While I covered the topic in my Newsfeed on February 8 and 9, I thought it was important to blog about the February 8 Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pension (HELP) drug price hearing. I have listened to every minute of the almost three-hour drug maker CEO hearing (where three brand drug makers testified) as well as an additional thirty-minute hearing presenting the views of advocates and researchers. I want to share my reaction. First, it is important to remember that, while I am a Republican, I march up the middle of the spectrum on health policy in general and share many of the views that Democrats do on drug pricing. I tend to favor what the Democrats have done on drug pricing because I think movement needs to happen and what has passed in the Inflation Reduction Act’s (IRA) Medicare drug price negotiations is a good experiment. Second, the

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