health care

Tommy Thompson, former U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services, will be among the speakers at a June 8 conference on Medicaid financing.Rising healthcare costs and diminishing health insurance coverage will be among critical issues debated by leading medical policy experts as Washington University hosts a daylong public forum on Medicaid financing June 8 in the School of Medicine’s Eric P. Newman Education Center. Participants include top administrators from a half dozen major research hospitals and a range of academic, government and think-tank policy experts, including Tommy Thompson, former U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services.

Rising health care costs and diminishing health insurance coverage will be among critical issues debated by leading medical-policy experts as the University hosts a daylong public forum on Medicaid financing June 8.

The Bush administration’s plan to push through health savings accounts is limited in how much it can lower healthcare costs, according to a business professor in the Olin School of Business at Washington University. He says that health savings accounts could work for some things – if the relationship between most doctors and patients changes, and if there were greater acceptance of the variety of ways to keep people healthy. More…

Medicare Part D decisions can be confusingDuring the next six months, Medicare recipients will need to enroll in one of the new prescription drug coverage plans. But with the deluge of information about Medicare Part D, some reliable and some not, “seniors find themselves in an environment of fear and confusion,” says Edward F. Lawlor, Ph.D., a Medicare expert and dean of the School of Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis. “There is so much noise about the prescription drug program, but people are not getting clear, simple information. Many seniors aren’t even entertaining making the proper plan choice.”

Bernstein”Imagine an electrical appliance industry with plugs of 9,000 different shape and sizes that need one of 9,000 matching sockets to work. Preposterous as that is, that’s the “design” of American health insurance – tens of thousands of medical care providers must plug their billions of billings into thousands of differing insurance policies,” says Merton C. Bernstein, a founding member of the National Academy of Social Insurance and the Coles Professor of Law Emeritus at Washington University in St. Louis. “This wasteful design has its silver lining, though. Eliminating administrative costs through universal Medicare coverage, or Medicare-for-All, would save as much as $280 to $300 billion a year, enough to pay for covering the 45 million uninsured. ”

The urban legends about managed care convey a sense that managed care often leads to early death. However, the business methods employed by managed care frequently result in reduced cost for the companies and the individuals enrolled in the programs. Because of the potential savings, the trend has been to encourage Medicare enrollees to use managed care programs. A recent study by a professor in the business school Washington University in St. Louis and a colleague suggests that it’s not managed care that increases mortality; it’s lack of drug coverage. The study suggests that a one percent increase in the number of people enrolled in Medicare Managed Care without drug coverage would result in an additional 5,100 deaths among the elderly population of the United States in one year.

Eliminating the need to ascertain eligibility.Years of double-digit increases in health care costs are devastating business, federal, state and family budgets. While the United States pays more per capita for health care than any other industrialized country, 44 million people lack assured care. “Most people overlook the most affordable way to achieve universal coverage – putting all of us under the Medicare umbrella,” says Merton C. Bernstein, a founding member of the National Academy of Social Insurance and the Coles Professor of Law Emeritus at Washington University in St. Louis. “That single-payer system would reduce non-benefit spending by doctors, hospitals, clinics, laboratories and health care insurers by about $300 billion a year, providing funds to insure everyone without additional outlays.”

People who are enrolled in Medicare Choice HMO plans with drug coverage die at about the same rate as those in traditional fee-for-service Medicare plans, but mortality rates for those in Medicare HMO plans without drug coverage are substantially higher. That’s the conclusion of a recent study done by Gautam Gowrisankaran, Ph.D., an assistant professor of economics at the Olin School of Business of Washington University in St. Louis, with University of Minnesota colleague Robert J. Town. The researchers’ estimates imply that a 10-percentage point shift in coverage from fee-for-service to HMO plans without drug coverage could result in 51,000 additional deaths per year among the elderly.