Roger Collier
Most of the recent attention on the 2010 health care reform legislation has focused on the individual mandate. After two federal court rulings upholding the mandate, a third federal judge—in Virginia—ruled that the Constitution does not allow the government to require the purchase of insurance as part of regulating an interstate commerce market.
The New York Times headline was "Health Spending Rose in '09, but at Low Rate," but it could just as appropriately have been "Health Spending in '09 Took Biggest Jump Ever in GDP Share."
HHS has now released its final set of draft regulations for provisions of the Affordable Care Act scheduled to go into effect early in 2011. This last regulatory publication - actually a "notice of proposed rulemaking" inviting comments prior to implementation - provides proposed rules for disclosure and justification of "unreasonable" premium increases.
Included in the latest Benefits Package blog carnival is a piece from Joe Paduda's Managed Care Matters, criticizing health plans and their industry groups for their contradictory attitudes to escalating hospital costs and government involvement in the health care system.
It's amazing how much trouble a couple of hundred inexpensive health insurance policies can cause.
State governments, like California's, that are already well into the efforts involved in establishing insurance exchanges meeting ACA requirements, may be starting to worry after the mid-term election results.
American businesses spend a lot of time complaining about overregulation, but with the passage of the Affordable Care Act now some eight months in the past, it's the lack of regulations that is becoming a problem.
Having pulled off a very big win in the House of Representatives and substantially reduced the Democrats’ majority in the Senate, Republicans are now faced with deciding just what strategy to adopt towards health care reform.
Many weeks after its original target date, the National Association of Insurance Commissioners sent its proposed regulations for computation of medical loss ratios and associated rebates to HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius yesterday.
If anyone ever doubted the extent to which Congressional committees could turn good intentions into a bureaucratic nightmare, they need only to look at PPACA’s premium subsidy provisions and their potential impact on insurance exchanges.