AM Alert: California SEIU lobbies lawmakers on health care

Sacramento Bee

The Service Employees International Union California, fresh off a major local securing a tentative contract agreement that includes a raise, is marshaling its members this morning to lobby lawmakers. Sen. Ed Hernandez, D-West Covina, and Assemblyman Richard Pan, D-Sacramento, are scheduled to address attendees, who will be pressing health-related initiatives such as a Medi-Cal expansion as well as legislation to prohibit large employers from paying employees a wage low enough that they would qualify for Medi-Cal. The rally starts at 10 a.m. on the Capitol's south steps.

Full Article >

Divvying up California healthcare funds

Los Angeles Times

The 2010 federal healthcare law will make health coverage available to millions of the uninsured, but it won't reach all of them. In California, county health officials and the Brown administration are now tussling over how much to spend on the remaining uninsured, and on county health programs in general. Gov. Jerry Brown wants to reclaim some of the state tax dollars that counties have been spending because there will be fewer uninsured to care for, and that's not unreasonable. But the state should be careful not to undermine the counties' efforts to protect public health, nor should it deny them the ability to care for more people in a more cost-effective way, if they choose.

Full Article >

Sebelius Asked Companies to Support Health Care Law

New York Times

Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, disclosed on Tuesday that she had made telephone calls to three companies regulated by her department and urged them to help a nonprofit group promote President Obama’s health care law. She identified the companies as Johnson & Johnson, the drug maker; Ascension Health, a large Roman Catholic health care system; and Kaiser Permanente, the health insurance plan.

Full Article >

Affordable Care Act's challenge: getting young adults enrolled

Los Angeles Times

Arsine Sargsyan is 23 years old, healthy and uninsured. She chooses to forgo coverage for one simple reason: "I never get sick." Despite her reluctance, Sargsyan is exactly the type of person insurance plans, states and the federal government are counting on to make health reform work.

Full Article >

California health exchange tops expectations

Modesto Bee

Californians can breathe a sigh of relief over a crucial first step in implementing health care reform. State officials last week unveiled the health plans and premium rates that will be available under the California health exchange. They show the market is working as intended — actually better.

Full Article >

New insurance market taking shape

HealthyCal.org

California’s new health insurance marketplace is starting to come into focus as a state agency in charge of implementing President Obama’s federal health reform steadily adds more and more detail to the emerging picture, like a painter filling in a vast canvass. But exactly how the final image will look to consumers remains a bit murky. And we probably won’t know the answer until after the health benefits exchange, known as Covered California, opens for business Oct. 1.

Full Article >

Obamacare's California dreamin'

Politico         

The best news for Obamacare these days is coming out of California — but it’s a best-case scenario that might not work everywhere else in the country. The state surprised many when it announced that there won’t be any big price hikes for the health plans available through its insurance exchange — the marketplace that will serve people who don’t have another place to get health coverage.

Full Article >

Medicare charges vary widely at California hospitals, new data show

Los Angeles Times

Federal officials are shedding new light on how much hospital bills vary across Southern California and the rest of the country. Medicare released pricing information Wednesday for more than 3,300 U.S. hospitals on the top 100 procedures and treatments in 2011. The federal health program for seniors and private insurers only pays a fraction of these billed charges.

Full Article >

Wal-Mart Could Transform Health Care. But Does it Want to?

California Healthline

"Why is Wal-Mart speaking at a health care summit?" the company's vice president for health and wellness, Marcus Osborne, rhetorically offered up at a conference back in January. "Wal-Mart's in retail, we're not in health care." But as analysts, researchers, and other experts who spoke with "Road to Reform" took care to point out, Wal-Mart is in health care, and getting further entrenched by the year.  In the past six months alone, Wal-Mart launched a major contracting initiative with half-a-dozen major hospitals, and dropped hints -- since retracted -- that the company is exploring new services like a health insurance exchange.

Full Article >

Steinberg Releases Plan to Boost Mental Health Care in California

California Healthline

On Tuesday, California Senate Pro Tempore Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento) released a proposal that aims to improve mental health services in the state and reduce the number of patients with mental illnesses in prisons and hospitals, the Sacramento Bee's "Capitol Alert" reports. Background: Steinberg said he was motived to develop the proposal by "heart-breaking and often tragic" situations that involve individuals with mental illnesses.

Full Article >

Ezekiel Emanuel: Health-Care Exchanges Will Need the Young Invincibles

Wall Street Journal

In less than five months, on Oct. 1, the Affordable Care Act's insurance exchanges will go live online. Millions of Americans will suddenly be able to log on to a website and choose their own heath-care coverage from a menu of subsidized options for prices and coverage levels. As the opening day gets closer, anxiety is increasing over how well these online exchanges will function.

Full Article >

Florida Flips Back

Wall Street Journal

The nine Republican Governors who decided earlier this year to pump some helium into the ObamaCare balloon and expand Medicaid forgot about that saving grace of American politics: the separation of powers. On Friday Florida became the latest state to reject the expansion, as Governor Rick Scott failed to convince the GOP-controlled legislature to approve his Medicaid flip.

Full Article >

Broken promise No. 2: ‘More people will have health coverage’

San Diego Union-Tribune

This week, we’re looking at the broken promises that President Barack Obama used to sell the Affordable Care Act. This editorial’s focus: The assertion that under Obamacare, more Americans will have health coverage. The president’s happy talk would lead us to believe that many millions of people more are sure to have health insurance after Obamacare takes effect. But that ignores the perverse incentives in the massively complex law — and it assumes the law will be competently implemented by the states and embraced by the uninsured.

Full Article >

CalPERS seeking to catch errors, fraud in health enrollment

Fresno Bee

CalPERS is moving to strike from government health care rolls tens of thousands of people it believes are mistakenly or fraudulently receiving benefits. The fund, which is the second-largest health care purchaser in the nation after the federal government, figured last year that removing an estimated 29,000 wrongly listed children, spouses and domestic partners of government employees would save approximately $40 million annually.

Full Article >

Calif. Democrats at odds over Medicaid expansion

Associated Press

California was an early booster of President Barack Obama's healthcare reform law and was the first state to authorize a health insurance exchange in 2010. It also was quick to commit to the optional Medicaid expansion that has been rejected by some Republican states. Turns out, saying yes was the easy part.

Full Article >

UC system cuts lifetime coverage limit for health insurance

Sacramento Business Journal

Chancellors at all 10 University of California campuses have agreed to eliminate the lifetime coverage limit and other caps on essential health benefits in the student health insurance program. The decision was made Wednesday in response to recommendations by the 31-member UC Student Health Insurance Program Advisory Board. The catch: it takes effect with the new plan year for 2013-14 academic year, so current coverage limits hold until then.

Full Article >

Medicaid has mixed record on improving health for poor, study says

Los Angeles Times

As state leaders debate whether to expand their Medicaid programs next year under President Obama’s healthcare law, new research suggests the government insurance plan for the poor has only a mixed record of improving health. Medicaid beneficiaries are less likely than the uninsured to have catastrophic medical expenses and significantly less likely to suffer from depression, researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found.

Full Article >

Obamacare: How to switch plans, get kids coverage

San Jose Mercury News

How does the Affordable Care Act affect children in low-income families and people who want to buy coverage on the new state insurance exchanges? Below find some answers to questions that were posed by readers. Q: I am the breadwinner for a family of five, including my wife and three kids. The insurance for me is cheap, but for the entire family it's prohibitively expensive. I'd like to know if the health-reform law is doing anything for the kids of families — like mine — that earn less than 200 percent of the federal poverty level.

Full Article >

Reform May Improve Access to Pediatric Specialties

California Healthline

Children with special health care needs in Los Angeles County should not be treated as "small adults," according to pediatric specialists who see health care reform as a golden opportunity to design tailored systems of care for children with complex, chronic and rare health conditions.

Full Article >

Health Care Law Is ‘Working Fine,’ Obama Says in Addressing Criticism

New York Times

President Obama said Tuesday that his health care law was “working fine,” and he played down concerns that the law could disrupt coverage or lead to higher premiums for people who already had health insurance. At the same time, federal officials released simplified application forms to be used by people seeking health insurance, tax credits and other government subsidies under the law, which Mr. Obama signed three years ago.

Full Article >