[HEALTHWIRES]
Employers Gear Up for Health Care Changes bitly.com/QRgearup
A Healthy State for Older Adults If you want to find healthy older adults, you’ll have to look to New England and the Midwest, while the least healthy seniors may be found in the South. A new report lists the five healthiest states for older adults as Minnesota, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Iowa, while the least healthy states for seniors are Mississippi, Oklahoma, Louisiana, West Virginia and Arkansas. The listings are published in the inaugural edition of America’s Health Rankings Senior Edition: A Call to Action for Individuals & Their Communities, by the United Health Foundation. State-by-state rankings of health for the rest of the U.S. population were published earlier this year. Criteria for rating the states included annual dental visits, volunteerism, availability of food, drug coverage, hospitalization rates and the availability of home health workers. Also taken into account were smoking, chronic drinking, physical inactivity, poverty, falls, hip fractures, premature deaths, teeth extractions, nursing home availability and flu vaccines. “Chronic illness is unnecessarily high among seniors,” Rhonda Randall, senior advisor to United Health Foundation and chief medical officer, UnitedHealthcare Medicare & Retirement, said in a statement. “The coordination of care for seniors, particularly the 50 percent of the population with multiple chronic illnesses, is complex and increases pressure on our country’s caregivers and our health-care system.”
CDHP ENROLLMENT ON THE INCREASE
Enrollment in consumer-directed health plans (CDHPs) conM M tinued on its upward 2010 2012 trend, from 28 million in 2010 to 33 million last year. This was according to an analysis of the Mercer National Survey of Employer Sponsored Health Plans commissioned by the American Association of Preferred Provider Organizations (AAPPO). In fact, CDHPs showed an enrollment growth that no other type of insurance plan saw that year, with 13 percent of all
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workers in employer-sponsored plans choosing CDHPs. Survey results show
that the trend is likely to continue in the near future as well, with 48 percent of employers of all sizes expecting to offer a CDHP in the next five years. DID YOU
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Meanwhile, another study showed that CDHPs reduce the long-term use of outpatient physician visits and prescription drugs. Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI) used data from two large employers: one that adopted a health savings account (HSA) plan for all of its employees in 2007, and another with no CDHP. The research found that after four years under the HSA plan, there were 0.26 fewer physician office visits per enrollee per year and 0.85 fewer prescriptions filled, although there were 0.018 more emergency department visits. Additionally, the likelihood of receiving recommended cancer screenings was lower under the HSA plan after one year. Although usually offered alongside more traditional health plan designs, CDHPs are slowly increasing as employers’ only health insurance offering.
IN 56 PERCENT OF THE COMPARISONS OF LIMITS on out-of-pocket costs, nonprofit plans had less expensive limits for the consumer, while for-profits had the lowest limits in only 28 percent of the cases. Source: HealthPocket
46 InsuranceNewsNet Magazine » July 2013
QUOTABLE By ensuring that people can’t be discriminated against when they buy health insurance and helping those with modest income cover the cost of premiums, health care reform could help create a new generation of self-employed entrepreneurs. — Andy Hyman, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
HEALTH INSURANCE RATES REMAIN LARGELY STEADY
So far, health insurance premiums have remained steady in the lead up to the implementation of the mandatory insurance coverage provisions of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Between February 1 and May 1, 2013, health insurance premiums increased by an average of 1.2 percent per plan, according to HealthPocket.
States where plan premiums increased 5 percent or more over this period include Wyoming (7.8 percent), Illinois (7.7 percent), Wisconsin (5.4 percent) and Delaware (5 percent). Lower premium increases are coming in an environment of low overall inflation. This is welcome news to consumers after a ten-year trend in the employer-sponsored health insurance market where premiums increased 97 percent, more than three times as fast as the general rate of inflation from 2002 to 2012. Though there is no certainty about what effect the ACA’s mandatory coverage provision will have on premiums starting in 2014, this topic has reached a fever pitch in Washington. Some experts say premiums will go up while others say they might decrease. Others say it might be a mixture of both depending on the type of plan and the state in which an enrollee lives. Many agree, however, that the non-employer individual and family markets are likely to undergo some potentially dramatic changes that will likely have some impact on premiums.