hsa

A Harris/Wall Street Journal poll found that the majority of seniors who have enrolled in Medicare Part D so far, found choosing a plan 'difficult' and interpreting the benefits equally hard. The majority of respondents (60 percent) said choosing a plan was difficult for them. About the same number (63 percent) said interpreting the plan benefits offered to them was an issue. Overall, once enrolled in a plan, most said they were happy with the service they've received during the …

A new insurance industry report finds that the number of people enrolled in high deductible, low-premium plans which qualify for health savings accounts has approximately tripled over the last ten months. America's Health Insurance Plans, the insurance industry trade group, calls that growth "a real success." About three million people are now signed up in variants of such plans. Total enrollment still represents a fraction of the number of those enrolled in conventional insurance plans …

There has been much fuss about the HSA, with some estimates suggesting more than 1 million accounts were opened in 2005. But the majority of those have been opened by people who already had high-deducible plans. However, as companies like UnitedHealth Group, Aetna and Cigna push these consumer-directed plans to their mainstream employer clients, they are gong to face two challenges. The first will be to educate Americans about how to evaluate the healthcare services they are asking for …

This week the most convoluted program in the history of Medicare began. I've heard comments from friends, neighbors and people in the press saying that they can't make heads or tails of the new drug benefit.

Whether you like it or loathe it, there are some interesting parts of the Medicare Modernization Act, including the HSA provision and the disease management provisions. …

> Florida's Medicaid privatization experiment wins a cautious endorsement from,   of all places, the editorial board of The New York Times. Article

> Meanwhile, The New York Times shows that even with health insurance, patients are being driven to bankruptcy by medical bills. Article

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A new survey from The Kaiser Family Foundation and the Health Research and Education Trust confirms that the number of people with employer-based health insurance is falling rapidly. Sixty percent of firms offered coverage to workers in 2005, down significantly from 69 percent in 2000 and 66 percent in 2003. The drop stems almost entirely from fewer small businesses offering health benefits, as nearly all businesses with 200 or more workers offer such benefits. This survey confirms a …

A new article by Stanford economist Alain Enthoven and Kaiser Permanente Research Institute's Laura Tollens in this month's Health Affairs argues that integrating delivery systems to help share medical information and empower multi-disciplinary teams will improve patient care and significantly reduce healthcare costs.

Enthoven, the theorist behind "managed competition," which was the basis for some of the Clinton health plan, shows that the types of care coordination seen …