Jeanne Pinder
“A decade after the nation’s top hospitals used all their advertising and lobbying clout to keep their tax-exempt status, pointing to their vast givebacks to their communities, they have seen their revenue soar while cutting back on the very givebacks they were touting, according to a POLITICO analysis,” Dan Diamond writes over at Politico. “Hospitals’ […]
Jeanne Pinder
“The number of U.S. adults without health insurance has grown by some 2 million this year, according to a major new survey that finds recent coverage gains beginning to erode,” Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar writes for The Associated Press. “The new numbers highlight what’s at stake as Congress returns to an unresolved debate over Republican proposals to […]
Jeanne Pinder
“As Republican senators work to fix their troubled health care bill, there is one giant health insurance subsidy no one is talking about. It is bigger than any offered under the Affordable Care Act — subsidies some Republicans loathe as handouts — and costs the federal government $250 billion in lost tax revenue every year,” […]
Jeanne Pinder
“The Black Belt refers to a stretch of land in the U.S. South whose fertile soil drew white colonists and plantation owners centuries ago. After hundreds of thousands of people were forced there as slaves, the region became the center of rural, black America. Today, the name describes predominantly rural counties where a large share […]
Jeanne Pinder
“For five years, Christine Byrd figured her teenage daughter was going through a phase when she became withdrawn from friends and family and brushed off meals at home. It was only when Pepper Snider turned 17 that she was diagnosed with anorexia, triggering five years of intensive treatment, including thrice-weekly therapy, residential care, and hospital […]
Jeanne Pinder
We’ve learned some interesting things about providers publicizing cash or self-pay prices in our New Orleans partnership, “Cracking the Code.” Perhaps not surprisingly, when the people we’re talking with understand how this can benefit them, they give up the prices — information that for years has been a closely kept secret. We start out, as […]
Jeanne Pinder
“The current debate over the future of the Affordable Care Act is obscuring a more pedestrian reality. Just because a person is insured, it doesn’t mean he or she can actually afford their doctor, hospital, pharmaceutical, and other medical bills,” Helaine Olen writes over at The Atlantic, in a piece examining charity care and crowdfunding […]
Jeanne Pinder
“Medicaid’s original objective was to provide medical care coverage to the poor. The poor, like the elderly (whose medical care would be covered by Medicare), had been largely left out of the U.S.’s growing employer-based insurance market because, starting in the 1950s, insurers began the practice of risk-rating (i.e., basing insurance premiums more on the […]
Jeanne Pinder
Another week, another insurance company deserting patients in a wide swath of the country. Last Tuesday, Anthem announced it would pull out of the Obamacare marketplace in Ohio, potentially leaving individual insurance-buyers in about a fifth of the state’s counties without Affordable Care Act coverage to purchase,” the editorial board of The Washington Post writes. […]
Jeanne Pinder
“We reported earlier this month that the large publicly traded health insurance companies have reaped enormous profits so far in 2017. But the not-for-profit Blue Cross Blue Shield plans — the ones that have been the linchpins of the volatile Affordable Care Act marketplaces — have been doing a lot better than last year, too,” […]
