Gov. Pence's HIP 2.0 plan is nothing less than an attempt to roll back liberal policy on low-income health benefits as far as currently possible–and to get other states to follow suit. It might even be an opening bid for president.
Fees on hospitals will generate the lion’s share of the funds for Gov. Mike Pence’s Healthy Indiana Plan expansion. But the benefits hospitals will receive will outweigh those costs.
Now that Indianapolis-area hospitals employ large numbers of physicians, a new study suggests the integrated health systems will be able to charge higher prices to private health insurers.
On the eve of Obamacare, almost no central Indiana hospitals were having trouble making money. Hip replacements, heart surgery and Hamilton County were the biggest drivers of profits.
Hospitals, which have forced orthopedic implant makers to lower their prices in recent years, may have a harder time doing so when the combined Zimmer-Biomet controls nearly 40 percent of the market.
When I predicted on March 13 that Obamacare would fail to expand individual private insurance coverage in Indiana, I was completely off. It now looks like an extra 30,000 Hoosiers have bought individual health insurance this year.
Before local hospitals slashed staff and expenses last year, they had been boosting the pay packages of their top executives faster than hospitals around the country. Seven of every 10 senior executives at the major hospital systems in Indianapolis saw their total compensation rise more than 10 percent from 2010 to 2012.
Until doctors and hospitals make a whole lot more headway—or, perhaps, more accurately, are allowed to make more headway—in offering package deals, it’s hard to see major progress on containing out-of-control health care costs.
New tests have helped Roche Diagnostics grow its North American revenue, excluding its troubled diabetes care business, 23 percent over the past five years. But the money for diagnostic tests continues to go down in key areas, noted CFO Wayne Burris.
The typical hospital around the country will see its profits wiped out entirely by the changes coming from health reform and the aging of the population. But in Indianapolis, the hits will be cushioned by this region's fatter commercial reimbursements.
Indianapolis hospitals have begun to offer joint replacement surgeries to employers and insurers using “bundled prices.” That means, instead of billing piecemeal for each individual service and supply, the hospitals wrap everything needed from just before to just after surgery into a package deal.
Indiana is the most profitable state for Indianapolis-based WellPoint Inc., which operates Blue Cross and Blue Shield health plans in 14 states. WellPoint’s margin for Indiana in 2012 was 5.8 percent, 38 percent higher than WellPoint’s national average.
WellPoint’s commanding market share gave it a whopping $129 million in profit from its risk-based insurance products in 2012. But in percentage terms, WellPoint was not at the top of the heap.
For consumers that get tax subsidies in the Obamacare exchanges, out-of-pocket premiums will remain steady even if insurers raise prices next year. But the subsidies could fall if insurers offer lower-cost plans.
From this week’s historic data dump, I learned who the top 20 recipients of Medicare payments are in Indianapolis (hint: mostly labs, ambulances and eye surgeons). But the real takeaway is that meaningful price information about doctors is still a long way away.
If Indiana hospitals want an expansion of insurance coverage for low-income Hoosiers, Gov. Mike Pence thinks they should contribute toward the hundreds of millions of dollars it would cost.
The scramble for physicians by hospitals in recent years has led to more than a dozen physicians cracking a million dollars in compensation—and three dozen receiving at least a half million dollars. Hospitals, meanwhile, are recording big losses on their physician practices.
For now, at least, the year-to-year price increases of individual insurance under Obamacare look a lot like they did before Obamacare. That’s not a failure, but it’s not a success either.
Indiana University Health’s business deteriorated last year in nearly every area. But price hikes and a surge in outpatient visits to Indianapolis-area facilities mostly offset those problems.
Like much else about Obama's health care law, the milestone comes with a caveat: The administration has yet to announce how many consumers actually closed the deal by paying their first month's premium.
