Once the House and Senate come to an agreement about health care reform, it’s widely expected that the number of Americans with health insurance coverage will increase, likely by tens of millions of people. But as many people have pointed out, simply having health insurance does not mean that a person actually has real access to health care. Some people will opt for high-deductible, HSA-qualified health insurance policies because of the lower premium costs, only to find that they are unable to pay the deductible when they need care. Others will find that their area is under-served by medical professionals, with long wait times to see a doctor. In
Posts Tagged With 'Care'
Socioeconomic Status And Wait Times For Health Care
Critics of the current health care reform efforts have consistently pointed to the longer wait times to see a specialist when one is ill in Canada or Europe, compared with the US (of course, for people with no health insurance at all, wait times are probably considerable here too). Jason Shafrin has written an interesting article about wait times to see a specialist in Europe, and the role that socioeconomic status plays. I tend to think of European health care delivery systems being much less influenced by money than our American system, so I was surprised by the results of the study he described – basically, more educated Europeans had significantly lower wait times to see a doctor than did their peers with less education.
Jason came up with several possible explanations, all of which are likely contributors to the disparity in wait times. I’
Expect Some New Cost Trends in Health Care for 2010
We already know that Congress is working tirelessly to crank out the new health care reform that is expected to manage costs; in the meantime, you could expect some new trends in costs that you may not be happy with. According to a new Money Magazine article, as wells as a recent report from Hewitt Associates, the costs may be way more than you may have anticipated.
Health Care Costs to Increase
We already reported in Nov. 2009 that Towers Perrin predicted increased health care costs in 2010; however, it appears the predictions are now becoming a reality.
Elderly Care Resource Learning Center
Although no one likes discussing elderly care, it’s a good idea to at least be informed and make some decisions regarding it before you get to that age.
Maternity Coverage And Access To Midwifery Care
Over the last year we’ve heard a lot of recurring themes in the health care reform debates: Things like eliminating pre-existing condition exclusions and denials by private health insurance carriers, and requiring carriers to do away with gender rating when setting premiums. We’ve also heard quite a bit about requiring that maternity care be included on all health insurance policies. In Colorado, all group plans cover maternity care, but it’s rare and expensive in the individual market. Most individual policies don’t offer maternity care at all, and the ones that do (Rocky Mountain Health Plans, United Healthcare, and Assurant) tend to charge a lot for the coverage and offer limited maternity benefits.
When our son was born, we opted for a homebirth with two registered midwives. We had to