Unless you’ve been in the business long enough to be grandfathered, you’re probably required by your home state to complete a couple dozen continuing education hours each license renewal period.
For those who qualify, short-term health plans can be a great alternative to ACA compliant individual plans, especially now that the individual mandate penalty has been reduced to zero. True, short-term plans do not cover preventive care or pre-existing conditions, and they are not guarantee issue like individual plans are, but they do offer much lower monthly premiums than individual plans.
Let’s be honest—most preventive care visits don’t really prevent illnesses. When we go to the doctor to get poked and prodded during our annual physical, most of the tests are intended to determine if we already have or are susceptible to something that, without treatment, could become more serious.
In a recent AHCP blog post, we explained that a hospital price transparency law that went into effect January 1 of this year really does very little to help consumers better understand the cost of medical care. Instead, it simply requires hospitals to post their chargemaster data in a machine-readable format on its website. We finished the post by saying that “only time will tell how impactful this particular rule will be, but the movement towards transparency is a step in the right direction.”
If you think back to the days when you were studying for your insurance license, you may remember learning a couple terms that are related but have different meanings. In this post, we’ll discuss Adverse Selection and Moral Hazard and explain why both of these terms are relevant in today’s health insurance environment.
As we enter the second quarter, this is officially the slow time of the year. The phone has stopped ringing off the wall, and you’ve settled back into your normal insurance routine. So we have a question:
A recent article from Health Leaders Media summarizes the results of a global study from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington. Here are a few of the findings:
The Annual Election Period (AEP) for Medicare Advantage and Medicare Part D prescription drug plans runs from October 15 to December 7. During this time of the year, Medicare recipients can join an Advantage plan, switch from one Advantage plan to another, or leave their Advantage plan and return to Original Medicare.
A new rule intended to increase price transparency went into effect January 1st of this year. The rule, issued by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) on August 2, 2018, requires “hospitals to make publicly available a list of their standard charges or their policies for allowing the public to view this list upon request…on the Internet in a machine-readable format.”
In 2019, some of the nation’s largest pharmaceutical companies, after holding prices steady for much of 2018, announced they are raising the cost on hundreds of drugs. You probably saw some of the headlines.
