Stellar Health

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Suzanne Delbanco, Roslyn Murray

October 26, 2017

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Why Discrimination Is a Health Issue

Social Scientist David Williams provides an overview of the physiological response to health-harming stress and why good educations or higher-paying jobs don't necessarily protect from its effects.

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Connecticut is taking a significant step to improve transparency of insurers' medical provider networks, a move doctors and regulators say is necessary as consumers face more complexities in where they can choose to receive care.

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Network adequacy legislation passed in 2016 in Connecticut State Legislature

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RAND Researchers: Christine Eibner, Jodi Liu; Published by Commonwealth Fund; October 19, 2017

Modeling done by Rand on 6 potential individual market provisions to increase enrollment: 1) Enhancing tax credits for young adults; 2) increase tax credit amounts; 3) extending credits to more people; 4) both increasing and extending credits; 5) adding standard reinsurance; and 6) adding generous reinsurance.

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A week or so ago, David Anderson, Louise Norris, Andrew Sprung and I co-wrote an article explaining how different states were planning on handling 2018 individual market pricing given the massive uncertainty surrounding ongoing Cost Sharing Reduction (CSR) reimbursement payments. Our timing couldn't have been more fortuitous: Less than 48 hours after we posted the piece, Donald Trump announced that, sure enough, he's finally following through on his threat to pull the plug on CSR payments, effective immediately.

How CSR non-payment is handled in different states (due to how rate review and some other details shook out)

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Questions for New Single-Payer Advocates |

Seeing, hearing, reading, and feeling the new grassroots ferment among progressive Americans for a single-payer health care system, my gut reaction is: I get it. As newly documented in Elizabeth Rosenthal’s book, An American Sickness,1 and the Commonwealth Fund’s report, Mirror, Mirror 2017,2 our health care system provides shockingly poor value and outcomes, and rests …

John E. McDonough on single-payer challenges 

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The Community Health Center Fund: What’s At Risk? |

Tucked into the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was a special 5-year funding authorization to expand the reach of the community health centers program. This special funding authority expired in 2015. As part of the funding extension for the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) that year, Congress also extended the Community Health Center Fund for an …

CHC funding is tied to reauthorizing CHIP.  CHIP authorization expired Sept 30, 2017, still awaiting action.

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Posted 3/27/2017

Aetna requested 19.6% increase in third quarter, 21.5% increase in the fourth quarter, large group policies.

CID denied, allowed average increase of 19.9 percent (average requested increase was 20.6%)

Connecticut Market

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ColoradoCare: How Much Would A Universal Health Care System Cost?

A new analysis found that ColoradoCare would cover more than 80 percent of the state’s residents and would have a $38 billion annual budget.

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Improving Opportunity, Population Health, and Well-being Collectively

Life expectancy is lower and disease morbidity is higher in the United States than in other high-income countries.1 This situation, decades old, is not for lack of skilled medical care; the United States has among the world’s best hospitals and technology. Nor is spending on health care...

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Change happens at the speed of trust.

John Colmers

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Low-income Connecticut diabetics struggle with rising insulin costs

The high cost of insulin, which has risen by triple-digit percentages in the last five years, is endangering the lives of many diabetics who can’t afford the price tag, say Connecticut physicians who treat diabetics.

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In some parts of the country, adults with the lowest incomes die on average as young as people in much poorer nations like Rwanda, and their life spans are getting shorter.

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There’s a widening gap in life expectancy between the rich and poor

New research suggests it's not inevitable.

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UPDATE: I just asked Larry Levitt, Senior Vice President for Special Initiatives at the Kaiser Family Foundation, to take a look at my analysis to see if anything below seems to be significantly off-base in terms of my logic, analysis, estimates and so forth. I was particularly concerned because I've modified/extrapolated from a lot of data which was originally reported on by KFF. His response: @charles_gaba Obviously some of the estimates are approximations, but I don't see any glaring problems. — Larry Levitt (@larry_levitt) March 29, 2016 Over the past few days, I've been fine-tuning an ambitious attempt to boil down the entire U.S. population into a single pie chart broken out by type of healthcare coverage (or lack thereof).

Because I am a health policy nerd.

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Don't Be Fooled: Patients Can Shop For Healthcare

Price and quality transparency in health care has often been seen as the missing link for extracting more value out of our health care system. With the appropriate financial incentives, along with easily accessible cost estimators and information on physician and hospital quality, patients could flock to the lowest-cost, highest-quality [...]

Hmmmm...this guy is from the Manhattan Institute