Posts Tagged ‘insurance’
How will you pay your lifetime $4 million healthcare bill?
07/04/2012
The following infographic shows that a typical 22 year old worker and his employer can expect to pay over $4,000,000 in his lifetime for healthcare and health insurance. That number seemed awfully high, so I created a spreadsheet model to see if I could match it. I did, and here are my assumptions.
- Starting salary at age 22 = $53,000 ($870,000/year by age 70)
- Annual salary increase = 6% compounded
- Percent of income for healthcare = 18%, increasing by 0.3% per year
I assumed a modest salary that increased at 6% compounded each year, but that’s a simplistic view since raises are larger earlier in a career and generally taper off (or even go negative) as you get older. I calculated to age 70 to account for longer lifespans and the likelihood that young people will continue working that long by then.
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CAPABLE means Home, not Nursing Homes, for Seniors
06/27/2012
Source: Newswise (6/26/2012) — Nursing homes do not have to be inevitable destinations for frail older adults. Many—even those with long-term health problems—can remain at home and be independent. All it takes is a little help to change “disability” to “capability”.
A handyman with a few nails to fix a wobbly bannister can make the difference between staying at home and a nursing home stay. Visits from a nurse or occupational therapist can help simplify a bewildering medication regimen or improve the ability to get around the house and neighborhood. Simple, inexpensive steps may change the equation for thousands of seniors, but in reality, services like these are rarely available for many at greatest need—the poorest and sickest older adults receiving Medicare and Medicaid.
CAPABLE, short for “Community Aging in Place, Advancing Better Living for Elders,” and a $4 million Health Care Innovation Award from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, is about to change that reality. Read the rest of this entry »
Understanding the Healthcare Law
04/25/2012
With the Supreme Court set to decide the fate of the Affordable Care Act, you might wonder just what’s in it and why it was introduced in the first place.
That’s why I’m reposting this blog article from last year, which describes a great presentation by Dr. James Rohack on Health System Reform. Rohack is a practicing cardiologist and Director of Scott & White Center for Healthcare Policy. He is also a professor at Texas A&M Health Science Center and was the president of the American Medical Association from 2009 to 2010 during debates over Obama’s Healthcare Law.
The presentation was held in Sun City, a planned community north of Austin for retirees with active lifestyles. It didn’t include handouts, but I was able to find some of Rohack’s slides online and offer them below with my notes.
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Innovator’s Prescription: Disruptive Healthcare Solution
12/29/2011
Harvard Business School’s Clayton M. Christensen — whose bestselling book, The Innovator’s Dilemma, revolutionized the business world — now presents The Innovator’s Prescription, a comprehensive analysis of the strategies that will improve health care and make it affordable.
In this meaty 87-min lecture at MIT, Professor Christensen explains how you can’t believe everything you learn in business school and reveals insights into such socially significant and complex industries as health care. “It’s the principles of good management that can cause successful companies to fail,” he says.
The lecture introduced concepts from his latest book, where Christensen applies his principles of disruptive innovation to the broken health care system. With collaboration from two pioneers in the field — Dr. Jerome Grossman and Dr. Jason Hwang — he examines a range of symptoms and offers proven solutions.
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Hospital-Insurer-Doctor lines start to blur
12/13/2011
In The Future of U.S. Health Care, Wall Street Journal reporter Anna Wilde Mathews writes a wonderfully comprehensive report about innovation in different models of delivering healthcare with aims at containing or lowering costs.
The story includes a close look at what five people are doing to help remake the $2.6 trillion U.S. health-care industry. They include a doctor, a hospital CEO, an insurance-company official, a human-resources executive, and a patient, and each of their stories and audio interview are provided.
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Qualcomm Life connects Wireless Medical Devices & Cloud
12/08/2011
Qualcomm announced this week that Qualcomm Wireless Health is now Qualcomm Life, a wholly-owned subsidiary whose mission is to define and connect the global wireless health network and bring medical devices to life by securely connecting them to cloud-based services. The encrypted and HIPAA compliant bimetric data is then remotely accessible by device users, their health care providers and caregivers. (video & illustration below)
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It’s Fall – Time for Talking Turkey about Healthcare…
12/02/2011
We need to talk about healthcare, the role of funding, the need for healthcare teams, and core infrastructure from workplace culture to technology. Parts of this post began as a comment in Employee Benefit News, a LinkedIn group. Let’s start with the money.
There’s a pattern here—banks collect a 5% margin on health insurance cash flow. This is not small potatoes. Healthcare insurance, mostly self-insured employer costs, was about 33.5 percent of the $2.3 trillion spent on healthcare in 2008, i.e., almost 70 percent of the half of health cost not paid by Medicare and Medicaid (see National Health Expend Data). This annual $770 billion allows the 5% margin to feed some $38 billion into the banking sector’s P&L statement. And, the annual $770 billion flow is money banks can invest in securities markets, or can lend.
In Snake Bit, I took a different look at annual health insurance evaluation and the danger of getting Snake Bit if we don’t dig into the details, compare plans, and consider our historical and anticipated medical costs.
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The Future of U.S. Healthcare, by Barry Bittman, MD
11/18/2011
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Putting Patients at the center of their Health Care
11/14/2011
Here is full text of an article by by by Jodi G. Daniel / JD MPH, Director of the Office of Policy and Planning at the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services. It is provided with full attribution and a link to the original article but without copyright concerns, because I believe it’s important enough to be promoted widely and don’t expect any complaints. If, however, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) asks me to remove it, I will surely do so.
Snake Bit – It’s health insurance renewal time
11/01/2011
Even more than the demographics of aging, the perverse incentives of insurance companies and the Fee-for-Service business model are driving healthcare costs higher and higher. Take control now or get snake bit later.
The United States ranks 47th in life expectancy at birth, behind Bosnia, and 54th, behind Bangladesh, in “fairness,” a measure of the extent to which the best care is available equally throughout a country. — Wendell Potter
Halloween’s passing means it’s time to renew your health insurance
Insurers make it nearly impossible for consumers to find out in advance what is actually covered by their policy and you’ll pay if you get injured or sick. That’s why the Affordable Care Act that Obama signed last year requires full disclosure in plain and simple terms. But it’s not that simple.
