How to curb health care costs
Hospitals charge commercial payers far more than is needed to cover their expenses, with people who pay insurance premiums ultimately paying the price.
Hospitals charge commercial payers far more than is needed to cover their expenses, with people who pay insurance premiums ultimately paying the price.
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The coronavirus pandemic has forced Americans to substitute virtual interactions for many things we’d rather do in-person. Expanded access to telemedicine is one change precipitated by the coronavirus pandemic that has changed our health care system for the better.
A surprise medical bill is an unexpected charge not covered by insurance even though the patient received care at a facility or from a doctor they believed to be within their insurance network. State and federal policies, including some specifically aimed at COVID-19 patients, don't fully protect patients. The nation should expand surprise billing protections to include all patients, now and after the coronavirus pandemic ends.
Now, with people struggling and in fear, is no time to prioritize bailing out the cruise ship industry or the fracking industry. When it comes to the health of the broader economy, we are likely to have more time to remedy the economic wounds than we will to address the physical and emotional wounds the virus will inflict.
I recently spent 45 minutes making calls to straighten out a health care billing problem. Multiply my experience by that of millions of Americans, and we collectively must spend millions of hours on the phone and online each year with insurers and providers to obtain insurance coverage, schedule appointments and straighten out incorrect bills. Many of these activities are a direct result of how complicated our system of providing and paying for care is.
In 2013, more than 550,000 Oregonians lacked health insurance. By 2017, thanks to the federal Affordable Care Act, that number had fallen by more than half. Recent changes by the federal government threaten to undermine this progress by making it harder for Oregonians who purchase insurance in the individual market to continue to do so. Our new report, A Better Health Insurance Market for Oregon: Options for Oregon to Maintain Consumer Access to Affordable Health Insurance, explores several options for how Oregon might respond to policy changes that threaten to weaken the individual insurance market.
Associate Director and Senior Policy Analyst, Frontier Group