The CDC reports that compared to heart healthy workers, those with heart disease cost health plans a week of absences plus $1,100 in lost productivity per year. Controlling high blood pressure is a huge part of maintaining heart health. It can reduce health risks associated with conditions such as sleep apnea, diabetes, cardiac arrhythmias, elevated blood cholesterol, obesity, heart failure, kidney disease and other related conditions.
Confirming that heart disease is still the number one cause of death in the U.S., the CDC states that nearly half of all adults have high blood pressure. Sadly, less than one in four has their blood pressure under control. With February being American Heart Month, take time to educate employees on the risk of heart disease and the need to get their blood pressure under control. It can make a huge difference in their quality of life and everyone’s cost of healthcare.
According to the Employee Benefits Research Institute and Greenwald Research, the percentage of adults saying that telemedicine has become extremely important to them increased from 7 to 17% in the last four years. Even more impressive, nearly 75% who used telemedicine said they were satisfied or very satisfied. One caveat – 62% of respondents reported that their telemedicine visit was with a provider they knew from an existing relationship or a prior visit.
Only a few months after Amazon, JPMorgan Chase and Berkshire Hathaway ended their “Haven” healthcare experiment, JPMorgan Chase introduced a new unit dedicated to collaborating with outside organizations to accomplish its healthcare objectives. Morgan Health is expected to partner with leading health plans and provider groups to improve access, quality and cost for its nearly 300,000 employees and dependents.
New guidelines issued by CMS earlier this Spring state that all files uploaded by health plans and insurance carriers must be in formats the public can use. Before issuing this guidance, some files included coding that kept Google and other search engines from indexing names and prices listed by hospitals on their websites, making it very hard for consumers to access the data.
While former President Trump signed the No Surprises Act into law as part of the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021, CMS is still working on regulations that will become effective for insured and self-funded health plan years that begin on or after Jan. 1, 2022. Implementing this law will be interesting, experts say. While many of its provisions were designed to protect people from getting unexpected bills for care from out-of-network providers at in-network hospitals and surprise bills from out-of-network emergency care providers including air ambulance services, many types of bills that “surprise” consumers may indeed be outside the scope of the Act.
In an effort to revive an important promise made to the American people prior to his election in 2016, President Trump recently signed 3 executive orders aimed at bringing the cost of prescription drugs more in line with what consumers in other countries pay. One order, directed at Medicare Part D plans, would require that PBMs pass discounts or manufacturer’s rebates directly to consumers rather than to their health plans.
Inflation-adjusted limits for contributions to health savings accounts and high deductible health plans for the coming year were just announced. According to the announcement, eligible individuals with self-only HDHP coverage will be able to contribute $3,600 to their HSA in 2021, an increase of $50 from 2020. Those with family coverage will be able to contribute $7,200 in 2021 and those who are 55 years of age or older will be able to make an additional “catch-up” contribution of $1,000 to their HSA.
America’s Health Insurance Plans, a national trade association whose member companies provide insurance coverage and health-related services to consumers and businesses, has released a study revealing the breakdown of today’s healthcare premium dollar, as follows:
As reported by The Phia Group on March 29, 2019, a federal judge in Washington, D.C. ruled that the new Department of Labor rules expanding the marketing of Association Health Plans (AHPs) violate existing law. TPAs, brokers and employers see this as a significant blow to AHPs, especially new self-funded AHPs that have been preparing to launch on April 1, 2019.
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