July 01, 2010
12:15 pm
The new health reform law mandated that, by July 1, 2010, the federal government create a website to help consumers better understand their health coverage options. That site, healthcare.gov, went live on the Internet this morning.
The site is structured so that people in every state can answer some basic questions about themselves and their healthcare needs and then receive a list of potential options for acquiring some form of health coverage. The Department of Health and Human Services collected information from over 1,000 insurers as well as the Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program in each state in order to create the site’s database. Healthcare.gov also has information on wellness and prevention as well as basic facts about the new health reform law.
HHS has also set up a Twitter feed at @healthcaregov as well as a YouTube site with information videos.
More on the site is found in this story on Politics Daily.
I haven’t had the opportunity to try out the site long enough to test its easy of usage or the breadth of its information, but I applaud HHS for getting the website up and running in such relatively quick time after the passage of health reform legislation. We know from experience with the Medicare Part D planfinder website that it takes time to work out the kinks and create a Web platform that the public can easily understand and access. The federal government has plenty of time to make these improvements before the new health insurance exchanges start in 2014.
June 25, 2010
10:39 am
There is an interview well worth reading on Kaiser Health News today. Kate Lorig is the director of the Patient Education Research Center at Stanford University and is the creator of an initiative called the Chronic Disease Self-Management Program.
With eight out of every 10 over-65 adults having at least one chronic disease, and with chronic illnesses accounting for over 70 percent of our nation’s $2 trillion annual healthcare bill, Dr. Lorig’s program is a valuable one. The workshops and classes she initiated help chronic disease sufferers better communicate about their conditions engage in healthier lifestyles and do a more effective job handling their medication regimens.
The Kaiser interview caught my attention because Dr. Lorig makes an important point about the flaws in our healthcare system when it comes to treating many patients with chronic diseases. She said:
“Right now, it addresses diseases or even parts of diseases or small sub-parts of the body. It does not address the whole, complex person with multiple chronic diseases. So, right now, what happens, if you’re lucky, you go to a primary care doc who kind of does the day-to-day stuff and then you see four or five specialists each of which do their little specialty part — none of whom really talk to each other except maybe to look at your laboratory tests on an electronic medical record if you’re really lucky. It is totally uncoordinated. It’s chaotic. It serves pieces of people, not whole people.”
To be fair, there are a number of forward-thinking healthcare systems in the United States that have adopted coordinated care models and do an outstanding job bringing primary care physicians and specialists together to treat patients with a holistic approach. But, I can also attest personally, from overseeing my own father’s medical care, that there are too many cases where physicians aren’t communicating and don’t see the whole picture of a patient’s care when they recommend a new treatment or medication.
With over 50 percent of our senior population having multiple chronic diseases, it is clearly essential that coordinated care be the rule rather than the exception. And, as we move forward with the implementation of health reform, this has to be one of the most important priorities.
June 11, 2010
11:19 am
Over the last decade, medical science has made tremendous strides in conquering disease. Deaths from stroke, HIV, heart disease, prostate cancer and several other diseases have dropped significantly thanks to investments in research and strides in developing new treatments.
Alzheimer’s Disease, however, has been an illness that has, to date, defeated the best that modern medicine has thrown at it. From 2000 to 2006, deaths from Alzheimer’s actually increased by over 46 percent, making it the nation’s seventh leading cause of death.
There’s encouraging news, though, in a new approach that many of the nation’s drugmakers are taking toward this challenge.
Johnson & Johnson, AstraZeneca, Sanofi-Aventis, Abbott Laboratories and GlaxoSmithKline are going to take the unusual step of pooling the data from the clinical trials they have performed in their respective efforts to find an effective treatment for Alzheimer’s. This means information from over 4,000 patients will now be in a single database accessible to all of the participating pharmaceutical companies as well as outside researchers.
The significance? Such a large database may shed more light on how Alzheimer’s progresses in patients and potentially enable the development of new studies. As Food and Drug Administration Deputy Commissioner Joshua Sharfstein said, this is the “kind of collaboration that does represent a major shift in thinking about how to accelerate drug development.”
Kudos to the involved pharmaceutical companies for taking a creative step that may bring us closer to treatment for a disease that is affecting millions of individuals and families.
June 10, 2010
2:04 pm
One of the best overviews I’ve seen of the issues facing health insurers – and, for that matter, health providers – as we move forward toward health reform implementation comes in this month’s issue of Health Affairs. It’s an article written by Healthcare Leadership Council member Troyen Brennan, executive vice president of CVS Caremark, and University of Melbourne professor David Studdert. For those speculating on the coverage-and-cost obstacles, as well as opportunities in the new health reform law, this piece is well worth reading.
Among the key points made by Brennan and Studdert:
• Under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, medical underwriting will be virtually eliminated. The authors write that insurers should still be able to construct reasonable risk pools, but many insurers fear that the new insurance mandates will fall short of compelling compliance. This is a worry we’ve expressed frequently in this space.
• When Massachusetts launched its own health reforms, all stakeholders in the state wanted the reforms to work. This is not the case with the federal version, as exemplified by 20 states suing to overturn the new law. The smart money, they write, is on the suits failing and insurers would be prudent to plan for the new exchanges in 2014 rather than waiting for the Supreme Court to rule.
• Various players in the new exchanges will face difficult cross-pressures. Insurers will be under pressure to keep health coverage affordable, even though the legislation “does not do enough to change the fundamental cost drivers in health care.” That places state insurance commissioners in the undesirable position of trying to hold the line on consumer costs while also maintaining the solvency of insurance carriers.
• There still exists a critical lack of details on important issues such how insurance products can be sold across state lines (a door opened by the new law), the amount of transparency required, and how the costs of disease prevention factors into the new medical loss ratio requirements.
Brennan and Studdert write that, through new care models and payment reforms, the new law does provide opportunities to reduce care costs without compromising quality, but that success will rest upon the ability of providers, regulators and insurers to productively cooperate.
April 14, 2010
3:20 pm
This week, Johnson & Johnson’s Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Bill Weldon added a new activity to his day—blogging. He became a contributor, for the very first time as he acknowledged, to the JNJBTW blog for company employees. His post reinforces the idea that employers need to have a more involved role in attacking disease and he outlines how Johnson & Johnson has established wellness techniques to do just that.
He wrote:
“J&J employees get a $500 discount off their health insurance premiums if they work to reduce their health risks – things like smoking, overeating, high cholesterol, physical inactivity, hypertension and stress. We try to make this easier to do, with on-site clinics, screenings, counseling, gym facilities, and cafeterias that served healthy food. We also have interactive and personalized digital health coaching that’s available 24/7. The coaching is tailored to each person’s motivations, confidence level, medical needs, personal characteristics and lifestyle.
So what’s the result? Only 4 percent of J&J employees smoke compared with more than 18 percent of Americans. Less than 7 percent of our people have high blood pressure, yet 28 percent of the U.S. public does. Seven percent of J&J employees have high cholesterol, while five times as many Americans – 37 percent – do.
With those kinds of changes, we estimate we’ve avoided some $21 million in costs from 2001 to 2009 alone. Our health care costs are trending 4 percent below increases for industries such as ours. And our return on investment has been 4 to 1, about $4 in healthcare and productivity savings for every dollar we’ve spent on prevention.”
There is no doubt that employer wellness programs can play a tremendous role in controlling healthcare costs. Currently, chronic disease accounts for 75 percent of U.S. healthcare spending. With more organizations taking this kind of activist role, the private sector can bend the health cost curve while also increasing workforce productivity.
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