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Business Health Insurance Information
Increasingly, more people are buying health insurance online because of the large number of offers featured on the Internet. There are many insurance providers that offer cheap health insurance quotes for those who are on a tight budget. However, finding the best plans available on the market is not as easy as it seems. Before you start searching for online health insurance providers, you should take into consideration a few things.Easy To Insure ME has the answers
The easiest way to obtain cheap health insurance quotes is to visit independent websites that allow customers to search for medical insurance online. Many of these websites provide a short form that you will have to fill in with information about your health condition, medical history, weight, height, age, gender, pre-existing conditions, lifestyle, drinking and smoking habits and more. Once you provide these details, you will receive cheap health insurance quotes based on your answers. If you provide accurate details, then you will obtain free quotes that meet your requirements.
Customers who use quote comparison websites usually receive cheap health insurance quotes from the best online health insurance providers. However, it is important that you research each and every company in order to find one that is financially stable and has a good reputation in the industry. Check if there are any customer complaints and search for unbiased information about the company you are interested in. Keep in mind that a reliable insurer will provide you with a custom health insurance quote designed to suit your particular needs.
As soon as you gather three to five cheap health insurance quotes, you will need to compare them side-by-side. Make sure you get these quotes from reputable online health insurance providers. Take into account the amount of coverage provided, as well as the rates that you will have to pay every month. Check if the policy covers pre-existing conditions, prescription drugs, medical emergencies, maternity services, routine examinations and surgical procedures. Ask about the limitations and exclusions of the policy.Kaiser Permanente is an integrated managed care consortium, based in Oakland, California, United States, founded in 1945 by industrialist Henry J. Kaiser and physician Sidney Garfield. Kaiser Permanente is made up of three distinct groups of entities: the Kaiser Foundation Health Plan and its regional operating subsidiaries; Kaiser Foundation Hospitals; and the autonomous regional Permanente Medical Groups. As of 2006, Kaiser Permanente operates in nine states and the District of Columbia, and is the largest managed care organization in the United States.
Kaiser Permanente has 8.9 million health plan members, 167,300 employees, 14,600 physicians, 37 medical centers, and 611 medical offices. In its most recently reported year, the non-profit Kaiser Foundation Health Plan and Kaiser Foundation Hospitals entities reported a combined $1.6 billion in net income on $47.9 billion in operating revenues.
Each independent Permanente Medical Group operates as a separate for-profit partnership or professional corporation in its individual territory, and while none publicly report their financial results, each is primarily funded by reimbursements from its respective regional Kaiser Foundation Health Plan entity.This morning’s story about the problems small business owners face in complying with the ACA doesn’t surprise me. My first gig as an economist, way back in 1979, was a summer internship at the Small Business Administration, where, among other things, I prepared an analysis of the impact of health insurance mandates on small firms. It was a pretty rudimentary piece of work: I was just a grad student and had not yet studied how to do applied micro analysis. Still, I was able to see the main story line.
Actually, I got two out of the three pieces of the story. First, I saw that there are economies of scale in group health insurance, and without some form of organization above the firm level, small employers will pay a higher unit cost. Second, and quantitatively more important, small firms in the US are substantially more labor-intensive on average, so an increase in labor costs hits them harder. The third piece, which I missed at the time, is that wages are lower in the small business sector, so a mandated benefit of given cost will constitute a larger share of the wage bill.
I concluded that, from a small business advocacy standpoint, a national health insurance program like Canada’s would be preferable to a system of employer mandates.
Since then I’ve learned that some European countries, like Germany, have employer mandates, but they don’t have the size-bias effect that ACA is likely to have in the US. To take Germany, for instance, there are two reasons for this. First, the Germans do have publicly-organized insurance pools above the employer level, which deals with the economy of scale problem, and SME’s are neither more labor-intensive nor lower-wage than larger firms in the same industries. In other words, Germany doesn’t have (in this respect) a dual economy problem that mandated health insurance intensifies.
But the US suffers tremendously from duality*—the division in the economy between larger, better-capitalized, more productive, higher-paying operations and smaller, less productive sectors that offer crummy jobs. (It isn’t entirely a division between firms because some large firms have established their own internal “secondary” sectors.) ACA should be examined in this context, especially since the administration hasn’t proposed any measures at all to reverse the trend toward greater duality, which is one of the underlying factors behind the growth in inequality.
Just to be clear, I think it is a big step forward for workers in the secondary labor market to be able to get health insurance; this will lessen, for them, the impact of duality. At the same time, however, we should not be surprised if ACA puts a differential burden on small business. In the US context this might be a good thing in some respects, since jobs in small enterprises are generally pretty bad, but there are other aspects of size-bias to consider.
Ultimately, however, this is a dual economy problem, not a health policy problem.
*Duality should not be taken literally. It is not about discrete separation but rather the tendency for size to covary with productivity and other related indicators. Despite its moniker, it refers to a continuum.Every now and again, a political pundit is required to stand up and admit to the world that he or she got it wrong.
For me, this would be one of those moments.
For quite some time, I have been predicting that Obamacare would likely mean higher insurance rates in the individual market for the “young immortals” and others under the age of 40. At the same time, my expectation was that those who fall into the older age ranges would benefit greatly as their premium charges would be lowered thanks to the Affordable Care Act.
It is increasingly clear that I had it wrong.Yesterday, Covered California—the name given to the healthcare exchange created pursuant to the Affordable Care Act that will serve the largest population of insured citizens in the nation—released the premium rates submitted by participating health insurance companies for the four health insurance program categories (bronze, silver, gold and platinum) established by the Affordable Care Act, along with the catastrophic policy created for and available to those under the age of 30.
Upon reviewing the data, I was indeed shocked by the proposed premium rates—but not in the way you might expect. The jolt that I was experiencing was not the result of the predicted out-of-control premium costs but the shock of rates far lower than what I expected—even at the lowest end of the age scale.
So, why the all too popular narrative that Obamacare would mean unaffordable healthcare premium costs for so many Americans?
Setting aside the never-ending nonsense peddled by the opponents of healthcare reform, everyone from the Congressional Budget Office to numerous private actuaries have warned that premium shock could be expected to set in once the public began to see the reality of what Obamacare would mean to their pocketbooks. And yet, the only real jolt to the system being felt by these public and private prognosticators today is utter amazement over just how reasonable the California prices have turned out to be.
How did the CBO and the actuaries get it so wrong?
As Jonathan Cohn of The New Republic correctly points out—
“One reason for the misplaced expectations may be that actuaries have been making worst-case assumptions, even as insurers—eyeing the prospects of so many new customers—have been calculating that it’s worth bidding low in order to gobble up market share. This would help explain why premium bids in several other states have proven similarly reasonable. “The premiums and participation in California, Oregon, Washington and other states show that insurers want to compete for the new enrollees in this market,” Gary Claxton, a vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation, said via e-mail. “The premiums have not skyrocketed and the insurers that serve this market now are continuing. The rates look like what we would expect for decent coverage offered to a standard population.”
Cohn is saying that, despite the political naysayers, the healthcare exchange concept appears to be working very well indeed in states like California, Oregon and Washington—the first states to publish the expected health exchange prices for purchasing coverage. These are also states that are actually committed to seeing the program work as opposed to those states whose leaders have a vested political interest in seeing the Affordable Care Act fail.
Keep in mind that the entire idea of the exchanges is to require health insurance companies to compete openly with one another by offering identical coverage programs in the three created classes—each offering insurance coverage that actually delivers meaningful protection to customers—and then openly disclosing the price each insurance company will charge for that policy. Thus, shoppers can clearly see which company has the best price on an apples-to-apples basis.
For all the negative chatter about how including older and sicker Americans in the health insurance pools would drive up the price for younger participants in the pool less likely to be ill, what we are now seeing in states like California is that the desire on the part of the health insurance companies to increase market share—thanks to the large influx of customers as a result of Obamacare—is driving prices downward.According to the administration’s blog post, setting up the system to collect that information is taking too long, and without that information they can’t enforce the employer mandate.
What the announcement didn’t say is that without that information, they can’t enforce the individual mandate, either.
The individual mandate requires taxpayer to pay a penalty if they don’t obtain “qualified” coverage, but there are a number of exceptions. Primarily, taxpayers are exempt from the penalty if the lowest-cost coverage available to them requires them to pay more than 8% of their family income. Calculating eligibility for this exemption requires information from every employer of every family member, including the employee share of the premium for employer-sponsored coverage, whether the employee worked more or less than 30 hours per week, the amount paid by that employer, and whether the coverage is for the employee only, or the employee plus his or her family. That is precisely the information whose collection is delayed under the administration’s new rule.
Furthermore, little-noticed in the announcement is that the delay in the reporting requirement applies also to insurers – including those offering coverage in the exchange. During the delay, insurers will not have to report the names and social security numbers of people they cover – in other words, the list of people who don’t have to pay the penalty because they obtained exchange coverage.
Since neither employers nor insurers will have to report who is covered under their health plans, how is the IRS supposed to determine who has to pay the penalty for failing to obtain qualified coverage? They won’t – by the same line of reasoning that the administration applies to the employer mandate.
As the administration puts it, “We recognize that this transition relief will make it impractical to determine which employers owe shared responsibility payments (under section 4980H) for 2014. Accordingly, we are extending this transition relief to the employer shared responsibility payments. These payments will not apply for 2014.”
Likewise, this transition relief will make it impractical to determine which individuals have not obtained qualified coverage and as a result owe an individual penalty. Even if the administration chooses not to explicitly apply the same logic to individuals, as a practical matter they won’t be able to prove that any particular individual did not obtain coverage.
Indeed, the administration has already gone even further with last Friday’s “honor system” regulation. States and exchanges “may accept the applicant’s attestation regarding enrollment in an eligible employer-sponsored plan…without further verification.” In other words, they aren’t going to collect the information necessary to verify anyone’s eligibility – both for access to exchange coverage, and for the subsidies that will often go along with it – so they’ll just take the applicant’s word for it. (The regulation also applies the same “attestation” concept to age, citizenship, immigration status, income, or any other “factor of eligibility for which the electronic data source is unavailable.” Since determining eligibility for exchange coverage requires the same information as determining whether one owes the individual mandate penalty, that will have to be on the “honor system” as well.
It is striking that in just a few short years, the administration has overturned, waived, or delayed – either with or without statutory authority – almost every major component of their signature health reform bill. Since October 2011, the administration has indefinitely suspended the CLASS Act (voluntary federal long-term care insurance, later repealed by Congress), declared an early end to the federal high-risk pools, and now delayed
for at least a year the Small Business Health Options Program (SHOP exchanges, to make it easier for small employers to provide coverage), the Federal Basic Health Plan Option (FBHPO, low-cost coverage for those just over the income limit for Medicaid), the employer mandate, and now, perhaps, the individual mandate as well.
All that survives – for the moment – is government-run “exchanges” with heavy coverage mandates, limited choices, and high taxpayer-funded premium subsidies for a large portion of the population.
Business Health Insurance Information
Increasingly, more people are buying health insurance online because of the large number of offers featured on the Internet. There are many insurance providers that offer cheap health insurance quotes for those who are on a tight budget. However, finding the best plans available on the market is not as easy as it seems. Before you start searching for online health insurance providers, you should take into consideration a few things.Easy To Insure ME has the answers
The easiest way to obtain cheap health insurance quotes is to visit independent websites that allow customers to search for medical insurance online. Many of these websites provide a short form that you will have to fill in with information about your health condition, medical history, weight, height, age, gender, pre-existing conditions, lifestyle, drinking and smoking habits and more. Once you provide these details, you will receive cheap health insurance quotes based on your answers. If you provide accurate details, then you will obtain free quotes that meet your requirements.
Customers who use quote comparison websites usually receive cheap health insurance quotes from the best online health insurance providers. However, it is important that you research each and every company in order to find one that is financially stable and has a good reputation in the industry. Check if there are any customer complaints and search for unbiased information about the company you are interested in. Keep in mind that a reliable insurer will provide you with a custom health insurance quote designed to suit your particular needs.
As soon as you gather three to five cheap health insurance quotes, you will need to compare them side-by-side. Make sure you get these quotes from reputable online health insurance providers. Take into account the amount of coverage provided, as well as the rates that you will have to pay every month. Check if the policy covers pre-existing conditions, prescription drugs, medical emergencies, maternity services, routine examinations and surgical procedures. Ask about the limitations and exclusions of the policy.Kaiser Permanente is an integrated managed care consortium, based in Oakland, California, United States, founded in 1945 by industrialist Henry J. Kaiser and physician Sidney Garfield. Kaiser Permanente is made up of three distinct groups of entities: the Kaiser Foundation Health Plan and its regional operating subsidiaries; Kaiser Foundation Hospitals; and the autonomous regional Permanente Medical Groups. As of 2006, Kaiser Permanente operates in nine states and the District of Columbia, and is the largest managed care organization in the United States.
Kaiser Permanente has 8.9 million health plan members, 167,300 employees, 14,600 physicians, 37 medical centers, and 611 medical offices. In its most recently reported year, the non-profit Kaiser Foundation Health Plan and Kaiser Foundation Hospitals entities reported a combined $1.6 billion in net income on $47.9 billion in operating revenues.
Each independent Permanente Medical Group operates as a separate for-profit partnership or professional corporation in its individual territory, and while none publicly report their financial results, each is primarily funded by reimbursements from its respective regional Kaiser Foundation Health Plan entity.This morning’s story about the problems small business owners face in complying with the ACA doesn’t surprise me. My first gig as an economist, way back in 1979, was a summer internship at the Small Business Administration, where, among other things, I prepared an analysis of the impact of health insurance mandates on small firms. It was a pretty rudimentary piece of work: I was just a grad student and had not yet studied how to do applied micro analysis. Still, I was able to see the main story line.
Actually, I got two out of the three pieces of the story. First, I saw that there are economies of scale in group health insurance, and without some form of organization above the firm level, small employers will pay a higher unit cost. Second, and quantitatively more important, small firms in the US are substantially more labor-intensive on average, so an increase in labor costs hits them harder. The third piece, which I missed at the time, is that wages are lower in the small business sector, so a mandated benefit of given cost will constitute a larger share of the wage bill.
I concluded that, from a small business advocacy standpoint, a national health insurance program like Canada’s would be preferable to a system of employer mandates.
Since then I’ve learned that some European countries, like Germany, have employer mandates, but they don’t have the size-bias effect that ACA is likely to have in the US. To take Germany, for instance, there are two reasons for this. First, the Germans do have publicly-organized insurance pools above the employer level, which deals with the economy of scale problem, and SME’s are neither more labor-intensive nor lower-wage than larger firms in the same industries. In other words, Germany doesn’t have (in this respect) a dual economy problem that mandated health insurance intensifies.
But the US suffers tremendously from duality*—the division in the economy between larger, better-capitalized, more productive, higher-paying operations and smaller, less productive sectors that offer crummy jobs. (It isn’t entirely a division between firms because some large firms have established their own internal “secondary” sectors.) ACA should be examined in this context, especially since the administration hasn’t proposed any measures at all to reverse the trend toward greater duality, which is one of the underlying factors behind the growth in inequality.
Just to be clear, I think it is a big step forward for workers in the secondary labor market to be able to get health insurance; this will lessen, for them, the impact of duality. At the same time, however, we should not be surprised if ACA puts a differential burden on small business. In the US context this might be a good thing in some respects, since jobs in small enterprises are generally pretty bad, but there are other aspects of size-bias to consider.
Ultimately, however, this is a dual economy problem, not a health policy problem.
*Duality should not be taken literally. It is not about discrete separation but rather the tendency for size to covary with productivity and other related indicators. Despite its moniker, it refers to a continuum.Every now and again, a political pundit is required to stand up and admit to the world that he or she got it wrong.
For me, this would be one of those moments.
For quite some time, I have been predicting that Obamacare would likely mean higher insurance rates in the individual market for the “young immortals” and others under the age of 40. At the same time, my expectation was that those who fall into the older age ranges would benefit greatly as their premium charges would be lowered thanks to the Affordable Care Act.
It is increasingly clear that I had it wrong.Yesterday, Covered California—the name given to the healthcare exchange created pursuant to the Affordable Care Act that will serve the largest population of insured citizens in the nation—released the premium rates submitted by participating health insurance companies for the four health insurance program categories (bronze, silver, gold and platinum) established by the Affordable Care Act, along with the catastrophic policy created for and available to those under the age of 30.
Upon reviewing the data, I was indeed shocked by the proposed premium rates—but not in the way you might expect. The jolt that I was experiencing was not the result of the predicted out-of-control premium costs but the shock of rates far lower than what I expected—even at the lowest end of the age scale.
So, why the all too popular narrative that Obamacare would mean unaffordable healthcare premium costs for so many Americans?
Setting aside the never-ending nonsense peddled by the opponents of healthcare reform, everyone from the Congressional Budget Office to numerous private actuaries have warned that premium shock could be expected to set in once the public began to see the reality of what Obamacare would mean to their pocketbooks. And yet, the only real jolt to the system being felt by these public and private prognosticators today is utter amazement over just how reasonable the California prices have turned out to be.
How did the CBO and the actuaries get it so wrong?
As Jonathan Cohn of The New Republic correctly points out—
“One reason for the misplaced expectations may be that actuaries have been making worst-case assumptions, even as insurers—eyeing the prospects of so many new customers—have been calculating that it’s worth bidding low in order to gobble up market share. This would help explain why premium bids in several other states have proven similarly reasonable. “The premiums and participation in California, Oregon, Washington and other states show that insurers want to compete for the new enrollees in this market,” Gary Claxton, a vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation, said via e-mail. “The premiums have not skyrocketed and the insurers that serve this market now are continuing. The rates look like what we would expect for decent coverage offered to a standard population.”
Cohn is saying that, despite the political naysayers, the healthcare exchange concept appears to be working very well indeed in states like California, Oregon and Washington—the first states to publish the expected health exchange prices for purchasing coverage. These are also states that are actually committed to seeing the program work as opposed to those states whose leaders have a vested political interest in seeing the Affordable Care Act fail.
Keep in mind that the entire idea of the exchanges is to require health insurance companies to compete openly with one another by offering identical coverage programs in the three created classes—each offering insurance coverage that actually delivers meaningful protection to customers—and then openly disclosing the price each insurance company will charge for that policy. Thus, shoppers can clearly see which company has the best price on an apples-to-apples basis.
For all the negative chatter about how including older and sicker Americans in the health insurance pools would drive up the price for younger participants in the pool less likely to be ill, what we are now seeing in states like California is that the desire on the part of the health insurance companies to increase market share—thanks to the large influx of customers as a result of Obamacare—is driving prices downward.According to the administration’s blog post, setting up the system to collect that information is taking too long, and without that information they can’t enforce the employer mandate.
What the announcement didn’t say is that without that information, they can’t enforce the individual mandate, either.
The individual mandate requires taxpayer to pay a penalty if they don’t obtain “qualified” coverage, but there are a number of exceptions. Primarily, taxpayers are exempt from the penalty if the lowest-cost coverage available to them requires them to pay more than 8% of their family income. Calculating eligibility for this exemption requires information from every employer of every family member, including the employee share of the premium for employer-sponsored coverage, whether the employee worked more or less than 30 hours per week, the amount paid by that employer, and whether the coverage is for the employee only, or the employee plus his or her family. That is precisely the information whose collection is delayed under the administration’s new rule.
Furthermore, little-noticed in the announcement is that the delay in the reporting requirement applies also to insurers – including those offering coverage in the exchange. During the delay, insurers will not have to report the names and social security numbers of people they cover – in other words, the list of people who don’t have to pay the penalty because they obtained exchange coverage.
Since neither employers nor insurers will have to report who is covered under their health plans, how is the IRS supposed to determine who has to pay the penalty for failing to obtain qualified coverage? They won’t – by the same line of reasoning that the administration applies to the employer mandate.
As the administration puts it, “We recognize that this transition relief will make it impractical to determine which employers owe shared responsibility payments (under section 4980H) for 2014. Accordingly, we are extending this transition relief to the employer shared responsibility payments. These payments will not apply for 2014.”
Likewise, this transition relief will make it impractical to determine which individuals have not obtained qualified coverage and as a result owe an individual penalty. Even if the administration chooses not to explicitly apply the same logic to individuals, as a practical matter they won’t be able to prove that any particular individual did not obtain coverage.
Indeed, the administration has already gone even further with last Friday’s “honor system” regulation. States and exchanges “may accept the applicant’s attestation regarding enrollment in an eligible employer-sponsored plan…without further verification.” In other words, they aren’t going to collect the information necessary to verify anyone’s eligibility – both for access to exchange coverage, and for the subsidies that will often go along with it – so they’ll just take the applicant’s word for it. (The regulation also applies the same “attestation” concept to age, citizenship, immigration status, income, or any other “factor of eligibility for which the electronic data source is unavailable.” Since determining eligibility for exchange coverage requires the same information as determining whether one owes the individual mandate penalty, that will have to be on the “honor system” as well.
It is striking that in just a few short years, the administration has overturned, waived, or delayed – either with or without statutory authority – almost every major component of their signature health reform bill. Since October 2011, the administration has indefinitely suspended the CLASS Act (voluntary federal long-term care insurance, later repealed by Congress), declared an early end to the federal high-risk pools, and now delayed
for at least a year the Small Business Health Options Program (SHOP exchanges, to make it easier for small employers to provide coverage), the Federal Basic Health Plan Option (FBHPO, low-cost coverage for those just over the income limit for Medicaid), the employer mandate, and now, perhaps, the individual mandate as well.
All that survives – for the moment – is government-run “exchanges” with heavy coverage mandates, limited choices, and high taxpayer-funded premium subsidies for a large portion of the population.
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