Income checks throw Californians off health plans
KCRA.com/AP,September 9, 2014
Some Californians who purchased individual health coverage through the state’s insurance exchange are suddenly being dropped or transferred to Medi-Cal, the program for the poor that fewer doctors and providers accept.
The changes are occurring as incomes are checked to verify the policyholders can purchase insurance through the exchange.
Officials at Covered California acknowledged that a number of people are being shifted around during income checks and eligibility updates.
“It will happen continually,” spokesman Dana Howard said.
This year, he said, the exchange adjusted its income eligibility scale when the federal government updated the poverty scale. As a result, Howard said, people near the thresholds are sometimes moved between private health plans and Medi-Cal. The checks might also determine that some people make too much money to receive a subsidy.
Evette Tsang, a Sacramento insurance agent, said some of her clients unexpectedly received Medi-Cal cards even though they were content with the plan they purchased through the exchange.
“There’s a lot of people who have never been on Medi-Cal, and they don’t want to. You hear the service is not as good, providers are not easy to find,” Tsang said.
http://www.kcra.com/news/income-checks-throw-californians-off-health-plans/27962242
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A California solution for a Medicaid quirk
Editorial, Los Angeles Times, September 9, 2014
The 2010 federal healthcare reform law required virtually all adult Americans to carry insurance, starting this year. And to help make policies affordable, it offered subsidies to lower-income households while expanding the Medicaid insurance program to more of the poorest residents. But there’s a key difference between those two groups: Only those in the Medicaid program may find their estates billed after they die to pay back some of the aid.
Most troubling, the new requirement to obtain coverage is prompting millions of Californians to sign up for Medi-Cal, where they are put in Medi-Cal’s version of an HMO. Only after they enrolled are they told that, if they are 55 or older, the state will seek to recover the value of the coverage from their estates. They could be in perfect health, receiving no medical care at all, but still be running up a bill that their estate will have to pay.
The California Legislature responded by passing a bill (SB 1124) that would stop Medi-Cal, the state’s version of Medicaid, from trying to collect repayment for routine medical care and insurance premiums. The measure now awaits action by Gov. Jerry Brown, whose Department of Finance opposes the bill because it would cost Medi-Cal an estimated $30 million a year.
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-medi-cal-20140910-story.html
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What can be done about Covered California’s doctor gap?
Editorial, Los Angeles Times, September 8, 2014
A separate study of three rural counties by the California Health Report found that more than half of the doctors listed by Medi-Cal in those counties either were turning away new patients or couldn’t be reached by phone.
A related issue is whether the networks offered by health plans can actually deliver the coverage the plans promise.
Insurers say they’re taking the problem seriously, which should help both those who shop for individual policies and the growing ranks enrolled in managed-care plans through Medi-Cal.
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-health-insurance-networks-20140908-story.html
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Comment:
By Don McCanne, MD
At the beginning of the health care reform process, we complained that the various factors in the proposed multi-payer model that would determine what health care coverage a person would have would be highly variable and would result in instability of health care coverage. The current experience in California provides an inkling of the extent of this problem.
Some who purchased plans through Californiaās ACA insurance exchange – Covered California – are losing that coverage when auditing demonstrates that income levels were not confirmed, income levels changed, or income eligibility levels changed because of updates in the federal poverty thresholds. Regardless, people were losing the coverage which they had selected, and became uninsured or moved to other private plans, or, in some cases, were involuntarily enrolled in Medi-Cal – Californiaās Medicaid program.
The latter is a particular problem. First, many of these people pride themselves on their self-sufficiency, even though they need to accept government subsidies so that they could afford the exchange plans. They understand that these subsidies are necessary, not for their own personal failings but simply because health care has become so expensive that the average worker can no longer bear the full costs. For these people, being forced into a welfare program – Medi-Cal – can be humiliating.
But what is even worse, the Medi-Cal ticket doesnāt automatically grant them admission to the health care system. Although there was already a shortage of physicians who would accept Medi-Cal patients, the lists of providers currently contain names of many physicians who are now turning away new Medi-Cal patients. Also, most of the newly eligible are being enrolled in Medi-Cal managed care plans when preliminary reports indicate that these plans do not have the capacity to carry the load.
Just to add further insult, those moved into Medi-Cal may have their estates billed to recover Medi-Cal costs, when there is no recovery process for subsidies provided for the Covered California exchange plans.
There are thousands of other reasons that coverage is unstable under the Affordable Care Act. In contrast, a single payer system provides the same comprehensive national health program for life. You canāt get much better stability than that.