Health Care Tag

Health insurance giant Aetna Inc. is imposing excessive rate hikes on more than 5,000 small employers, according to California's insurance commissioner. Commissioner Dave Jones lashed out Thursday at the third-largest U.S. health insurer for raising premiums as much as 20% on some small businesses starting Jan. 1. The average increase of 10.7% will cost small employers and their workers $23.5 million in excessive premiums, according to the state. ...Aetna said its rate increase was justified based on the expected medical costs for employers. The Hartford, Conn., insurer rejected the state's request for a lower increase. The state said a 2.6% increase was more appropriate for this group of 64,000 employees and dependents.

...From a bird’s-eye view, however, some analysts have pointed out that Aetna’s rate increases are a rational result of the market distortions created by the ACA’s regulatory framework. As Scott Gottlieb argued at Forbes, “Obamacare was designed with the goal of commoditizing health insurance. The belief was that competition between plans would turn largely on premiums and cost sharing. This was seen as a way to hold down prices.” What happened instead, Gottlieb explained, was that pushing down on competition in the areas of networks and care delivery discouraged competition between “different benefit packages and plan designs.” In other words, the big, established coverage providers discovered they could create many variations on very similar benefit packages. In a free market for health care, different plans would differ in their benefit packages as well — giving small business owners, for instance, greater options around not just scope of coverage but cost of coverage. Instead, the ACA has dramatically narrowed their available coverage, leaving business owners with little alternative to Aetna’s hiked rates.

“It is not the right time for Vermont” to pass a single-payer system, [Vermont Governor] Shumlin acknowledged in a public statement ending his signature initiative. He concluded the 11.5 percent payroll assessments on businesses and sliding premiums up to 9.5 percent of individuals’ income “might hurt our economy.”

“If cobalt blue Vermont couldn’t find a way to make single-payer happen, then it’s very unlikely that any other state will,” said Jack Mozloom, spokesman for the National Federation of Independent Business. “There will never be a good time for a massive tax increase on employers and consumers in Vermont, so they should abandon that silly idea now and get serious,” Mozloom added.

On Dec. 3, federal actuaries released data showing that health spending inched up only 3.6 percent in 2013. Marilyn Tavenner, the head of Medicare and Medicaid, boasted that it’s “evidence that our efforts to reform the health-care-delivery system are working.” Sorry, not true. That 3.6 percent figure is an improvement only by a hair. The real slowing of health care spending started way back in 2009...long before ObamaCare even passed. Health spending slowed to a comfortable 3.8 percent rise that year, and stayed at that slow pace in 2010. Not that the president acknowledged that health spending was growing at the slowest rate in a half-century. To pass his health bill, he needed a crisis. So he and then-Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius repeatedly lied, warning that costs were “skyrocketing,” spending was “spiraling” out of control... On Dec. 2, Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell announced “demonstrable progress” in making hospital care safer. Her report claims that some 50,000 fewer patients died from bed sores, infections, medication errors, falls and other mishaps from 2010 to 2013, largely due to new payment incentives and a patient safety program in ObamaCare. That happy claim was repeated verbatim by many media outlets. Not so fast, say patient safety experts who actually read the report...

Over 300,000 Americans have already been infected with the potentially fatal 'kissing bug disease' called Chagas but U.S. healthcare workers lack of knowledge about the illness is letting many cases of the parasite unnoticed. Some doctors are calling it the 'new AIDS' because of the way it develops. Researchers who gathered on Tuesday at the annual American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene meeting in New Orleans said that if caught early the disease can be cured however sometimes the disease can be asymptomatic and there is a dearth in medication for the condition. The CDC reports that the initial symptoms of the disease caused by a parasite, Trypanosoma cruzi, which is spread through the feces of kissing bugs includes fever, fatigue, body aches, rash, diarrhea and vomiting. One of the first visual signs can be a skin lesion or a purplish swelling of the lid of one eye.

"Anything that gives women more control over the timing of fertility is going to be helpful to professional women," said Shelley Correll, a sociology professor and director of the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University. "It potentially addresses the conflicts between the biological clock and the clockwork of women's careers: The time that's most important in work, for getting your career established, often coincides with normal fertility time for women. This can potentially help resolve that by pushing women's fertility into the future." ... As more women wait longer to have their first child, the number of women choosing to freeze their eggs has grown "exponentially," said Dr. Alan Copperman, a fertility specialist at Mount Sinai Hospital. They are also doing it at a younger age, which means healthier and more viable eggs.

The CDC released a statement today saying nine children in Denver had reported a neurologic illness that led to some limb weakness or paralyzation. All of the children had reported having a kind of respiratory virus before showing symptoms of limb weakness. Six of the eight children tested were found to be positive for a rhinovirus or enterovirus and four of those cases were found to be the Enterovirus 68. The other two cases were still pending. Dr. Larry Wolk, the chief medical officer and executive director for Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, said that the children affected range in age from 1 to 18, with an average age of 10. "It is a spectrum of arm or leg weakness that can be as mild weakness or as severe as paralysis," Wolk said. "What ties them all together though are findings of spots or lesions in the grey matter of the spinal cord on MRI scans."

California’s first cases of a virus that has been spreading across the country were confirmed Thursday by the state’s chief health official. Four cases of enterovirus D68 have been confirmed, all in Southern California. One was in Ventura County; three others were in San Diego County. The patients ages ranged from 2 to 13 years old. More instances of the disease were expected as results from lab tests come back, the California Department of Public Health said in announcing the cases.