Posted on 03/27/2014 7:09:07 PM PDT by kingattax
The problems with the implementation of the Affordable Care Act may be masking another major change in the way health care is delivered to U.S. consumers, experts believe.
At The Atlantic's Health Care Forum in Washington on Thursday, health care and business professionals said that there’s an increasing trend in the industry toward cutting insurance companies out of the process entirely, as large, regional hospital systems move into the insurance business.
Dr. Kenneth L. Davis, CEO and president of Mount Sinai Health System, the largest health care provider in the state of New York, said that starting next year, Mt. Sinai will begin offering its own Medicare Advantage plan. It will look for other opportunities to bring premium payments directly into the hospital system, rather than filtering them through insurance companies.
Davis said he expects organizations similar to his to move in the same direction. “Inevitably the large systems are going to move to take part of the premium dollar,” he said.
(Excerpt) Read more at finance.yahoo.com ...
Everybody will join in on the ACA government bailout gravy train.
If it will get the government out of it,it might be a way to go. Not sure what other implications might be as yet.
Fine — end insurance companies. Instead, make sure everyone has a fully-funded MSA.
What you will have then is defense attorney, prosecutor, judge and jury all on the same team, THE HOSPITAL TEAM.
Guess who gets screwed, YOU DO.
Right now, the prosecutor (bill collector) is the hospital, and the defense attorney is the insurance company (trying to pay as little as possible) and the judge and jury are the competitive market place.
Hail Kaiser?
I’ve wondered about plans where a range of treatments is offered under a subscription plan. This has worked for doctor offices. This doesn’t have to plug-and-play with traditional insurance at all — they can lose all the bookwork of traditional insurance and lose the need to support that.
I can just imagine the Hospital team collecting premiums and not delivering services. Talk about ‘Death Squads’!! Just cutting out the middle man, ma’am.
Insurance should be just that, Insurance. Risk management for unforeseen circumstances.
MSA’s (of HSA’s) are great for everyday occurences. But coverage for the BIG stuff like accidents and chronic diseases (cancer) is for actuaries.
I thought they didn’t like HMOs but isn’t that another name for what they are creating?
The idea of an MSA is to save enough (tax free!) to cover you for any medical situation, including an emergency. It’s like an IRA for healthcare.
Considering that a huge percentage of Americans don’t even have retirement savings, the notion of them saving up hundreds of thousands of dollars for a potential round of cancer therapy or any other expensive medical condition seems unrealistic to me.
Here ya go ... :-) ...
Hospitals Plot the End of Insurance Companies
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3138021/posts
... from earlier ... we had some good discussions here ...
this guy can’t be at penn. Dr Mengela. he has no patients.
Regional solutions at best
They are cutting their noses off to spite their faces. What an idiotic thing to do. Do they really understand what they are in for or is it another extortion?
HSA is much better than MSA
If the hospitals declare war on the sick, the relatives of the sick will pay them back. It would be a short war.
That is not how it works. An HSA requires an insurance plan be in place for the big expenses.
It has been my opinion for several decades, that having a middle-man in the health care chain, was a massive mistake.
Hundreds of billions of dollars are siphoned off the health care provision industry each year, without providing a dimes worth of health care to the public.
How would we like it, if when our food supply was ready to go to the market, we had to have food insurance to be able to buy the food products we need?
Would we want to see $750 billion in food insurance profits each year, realizing that $750 billion had been siphoned out of family’s pockets, reducing the money that went directly for food?
IMO, get the insurance companies out of that mix, and it goes a long way to making our health care a lot more healthy.
It frees up a massive amount of money to go directly to health care establishments, for the provision of actual services directly to patients.
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