Reform Rodeo

1. HRW’s Frank Pasquale’s post on reciprocal transparency — the idea that companies and other entities should be more transparent with respect to their data collection practices as patients become more transparent — is featured on The Health Care Blog.

2. On KevinMD.com, Maggie Mahar discusses what she thinks would happen if health reform is killed.

3. At the New England Journal of Medicine, Timothy Jost discusses recent rules governing the controversial restrictions on medical loss ratios.

4. Kaiser Health News has a short video up of their interview with the AMA’s president, Cecil B. Wilson, where they discuss the AMA’s new strategy regarding the “doc fix” that is set to cut physician reimbursement by up to 30 percent by Dec. 1st.

5. Chris Fleming at the Health Affairs Blog describes a new Health Policy Brief from Health Affairs and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation that covers the new process of “grandfathering” insurance plans under the health reform statute.

Good News for Health Care Reform Implementation

HCR implementation is steaming ahead. Jonathan Cohn lays out some of the key issues in a recent article in The American Prospect. A restrictive definition of “grandfathered plans” (which are not subject to the Affordable Care Act (ACA)) was an early victory for consumer advocates. Coverage appeal rules will soon be hotly contested during the rulemaking process:

Even if insurers are required to take all comers at relatively nondiscriminatory prices — “relatively” since age can be a rough proxy for medical condition — they’ll still have financial incentives to restrict care. This isn’t entirely a bad thing: Given the evidence of rampant overtreatment in American medicine, insurers should exercise some check on the use of technology, drugs, and other resources, for the sake of the patients as well as the insurers’ bottom line. But because insurers sometimes deny even necessary care, just to increase profit margins, the law seeks to limit the insurers’ authority — most obviously, by opening up treatment denials to outside appeal.

The idea sounds simple enough: Allow patients convinced they’ve been wrongly denied care to make their case to independent experts with authority to overrule the insurer. But who are the experts? How quickly must they rule? And what’s to stop insurers from ignoring the recommendations? The Obama administration has to write regulations answering all of those questions. A viable, working model exists: The National Association of State Insurance Commissioners has a framework, similar to what’s already in place in several states. HHS will consult those guidelines in devising a new scheme. The model is not perfect, but with sufficiently strong regulations it could give consumers significant new leverage.

Cohn also notes some important appointments at HHS. Having examined her work in the past, I was encouraged by the appointment of Karen Pollitz to “set up an Internet portal to provide basic information about different insurance policies.”

Nevertheless, Tim Jost warns that there are many possible obstacles ahead:
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