WGA InsureBlog

President Obama has unveiled his own version of healthcare reform, a measure that blends the Senate and House versions into one with the goal of getting both chambers to pass it. The bill is said to extend health insurance coverage to 31 million Americans, raise taxes on the wealthy and hold insurers more accountable.

The price tag is still unclear, but the cost of is said to be slightly higher than the Senate’s $871B plan. For a more detailed analysis of the President’s version, check out our series This Week in Health Care Reform.

The final Senate Healthcare Bill was released earlier this week with a Manager’s Amendment. Taking a glass half full look at the amendment, a number of the changes have been identified as employer-friendly, such as the elimination of a public plan option, stronger penalties for non-compliance with the individual mandate (designed as motivation to find health insurance coverage) and a $600 penalty for employers who impose a waiting period for health coverage of longer than 60 days, replacing the 30 day limit contained in the original version. Read more…

It looked as though Senate Democratic health care negotiators agreed this week to replace a government-run insurance option with a scaled-back non-profit plan. The government-run plan, one of the biggest hurdles in the health care overhaul, would be replaced by a plan operated by private insurers but administered by the Office of Personnel Management, which supervises health coverage for federal workers.

Now, in an effort to get a bill passed before Christmas, a group of ten Democratic Senators offered to take a “public option” off the table in exchange for a substantial expansion of Medicare. Read more…

The Medicare Modernization Act (MMA) mandates that certain entities offering prescription drug coverage, including employer and union group health plan sponsors, disclose to all Medicare eligible individuals with prescription drug coverage if the current health coverage they have is “creditable.”  This information is essential to an individual’s decision whether to enroll in a Medicare Part D prescription drug plan.  MMA imposes a late enrollment penalty on individuals who do not maintain Creditable Coverage for a period of 63 days or longer following their initial enrollment period for the Medicare prescription drug benefits. Read more…

As the Senate Finance Committee voted last week, a discouraging report was released from PricewaterhouseCoopers voicing new concerns from the insurance industry about the proposed health care reform legislation. A trade group, America’s Health Insurance Plans, sponsored the study and contends that some of the healthcare reform efforts being considered are poised to increase insurance premiums, more so than if no action were taken to reform healthcare in America. (For an outline of the provisions that support this claim, check out WGA’s latest installment of This Week in Health Care Reform.) Read more…