Anthem turned out unheard of gains in 2014, the first year of Obamacare’s new health insurance overhaul, as Anthem’s customers numbers held steady but their spending with hospitals and doctors plummeted.
The hospital system and a partner company have started meeting with health insurance brokers to pitch a program to save employers money by keeping workers and their families healthier.
The money, known as reinsurance payments, helped MDwise, Anthem, Humana, Assurant and the Physicians Health Plan of Northern Indiana keep a lid on their losses even as lots of new patients with expensive or untreated medical conditions migrated into the private insurance market.
Last week’s Supreme Court ruling upholding the tax credits for Obamacare is just the latest in a string of developments that have kept employers from ditching their group health plans, as many predicted they would.
For at least 20 years, Republicans have been pushing for giving tax credits to help individuals buy health insurance. The Supreme Court’s latest Obamacare ruling does Republicans the favor of preserving them.
Cigna said Anthem’s a risky bet due to fallout from its massive data breach, lawsuits that accuse it of conspiring to inflate prices, and lack of a growth strategy. But Wall Street thinks this deal is going to happen, unless Cigna can find another buyer.
But hospitals’ list prices in Indiana are more than three times what the federal Medicare program pays.
The Obama administration could write a new regulation. Congress could pass a short law. States could run a low-cost exchange. But the politics might require all parties to let the tax credits die while they try to pin the blame on the other side.
Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield has added St. Vincent Health to the “narrow network” of health care providers it uses for Obamacare plans.
While health insurers in states around the country have proposed large rate increases for the health plans they sell on the Obamacare exchanges, insurers in Indiana are asking for modest increases or even decreases. The bad news is that it appears the rest of the country is just catching up with Indiana’s already-high prices.
The new version of the Healthy Indiana Plan, backed by Obamacare funding, has enrolled 229,000 new participants in four months without breaking stride.
Wall Street analysts say a purchase of Louisville-based Humana Inc., which reportedly has put itself up for sale, would by Indianapolis-based Anthem. An Anthem-Humana marriage would be the biggest merger in the history of U.S. health insurance.
It took $394,000 to rank in the top 1 percent of U.S. earners in 2013. And more than 100 of the Indiana contingent in that exclusive club were physicians employed by one of the four major hospital systems that operate in the Indianapolis area.
The individual hospital campuses around Indianapolis saw their collective revenue rise 8 percent and their collective operating profits rise 22 percent from from 2011 to 2013. That’s solid, just not stellar, growth.
In Indiana, Anthem has struck accountable care organization deals with 14 health care provider groups and signed up nearly 2,900 primary care providers to its medical home program. And it’s pushing for more in the future.
For employer health plans, diabetics generate $10,000 more per year in medical bills than non-diabetics. That means the rise in the prevalence of diabetes over the past 25 years is costing Hoosiers an extra $2.6 billion annually.
Anthem Inc.’s brand has taken a noticeable hit since a massive data breach earlier this year, but the impact was blunted by positive perceptions of the way the company handled the breach.
That’s less than one-tenth of 1 percent of what Hoosiers and their health plans spend on hospital care each year. But it’s a step in the right direction.
A Health Department audit found nurse staffing routinely short on two patient units at IU Health’s Methodist hospital, where nurses are trying to organize a union.
To satisfy patients with high-deductible health plans, Northwest Radiology has introduced flat-rate pricing for its imaging scans. It’s a centuries-old concept among postal services, but for health care, it’s revolutionary.
