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A New Instructional Guide Has Been Released For ez1095 ACA Software Customers

June 3, 2016, 3:01 am
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ez1095 software is now available with several new instruction guides for multiple features. Test drive the 30 day no cost or obligation trial at http://www.halfpricesoft.com.

Seattle, WA (PRWEB) June 03, 2016

Ease of use and affordability are the main objective for Halfpricesoft.com developers. In the latest ez1095 Affordable Care Act (ACA) software application, customers can now access new guides on how to use several features. At no additional charge customers will get the instructions on how to handle the following tasks:

How to efile 1095 forms smoothly
How to import data
How to generate XML file
How to validate data
How to effortlessly submit forms to the IRS

“The latest version of ez1095 ACA software allows for customers to access a new guide on how to handle several tasks quickly and easily.” said Dr. Ge, the founder of Halfpricesoft.com.

In addition to the no cost guide, Halfpricesoft.com also offers free customer support for the software before, during and after purchase of the ez1095 application.

New ez1095 ACA form software is easy-to-use and flexible. Developer’s created this software in anticipation of the requirements by the government to file forms 1094 and 1095 starting in 2016. ez1095 software’s graphical interface leads customers step-by-step through setting up company, adding employees, add forms and print forms. Customers can also click form level help links to get more details regarding the software.

ez1095 software is compatible Windows 10, 8.1, 8, 7, Vista, XP and other Windows systems. Potential customers can download and try this software at no obligation by visiting http://www.halfpricesoft.com/aca-1095/form-1095-software-free-download.asp

Many unique features include:· Print ACA Form 1095-C, 1094-C, 1095-B and 1094-B on white paper for recipients and IRS with inkjet or laser printer.
· Generate XML document to check for errors.
· Replacement and corrected forms available.
· PDF print 1095-C and 1095-B recipient copies.
· E file version available at additional cost.
· Support unlimited companies.
· Support unlimited number of recipients.
· Print unlimited number of 1095 and 1094 forms.
· Print Form 1095 C: Employer-Provided Health Insurance Offer and Coverage Insurance.
· Print Form 1094 C: Transmittal of Employer-Provided Health Insurance Offer and Coverage Information Returns.
· Print Form 1095-B: Health Coverage.
· Print Form 1094-B: Transmittal of Health Coverage Information Return.

Priced at just $195, ($295 for efile version), this ACA forms filing application saves employers time and money. To learn more about ez1095 ACA software, visit http://www.halfpricesoft.com/aca-1095/aca-1095-software.asp

About halfpricesoft.com
Founded in 2003, Halfpricesoft.com has established itself as a leader in meeting the software needs of small businesses around the world with its payroll software, employee attendance tracking software, check printing software, W2 software, 1099 software and bar-code generating software. It continues to grow with its philosophy that small business owners need affordable, user friendly, super simple, and totally risk-free software. Reported by PRWeb 22 hours ago.
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The List: Florida Health Insurance Providers

June 3, 2016, 3:35 am
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A long-standing company ranked first on the South Florida Business Journal’s list of Florida Health Insurance Providers. The provider earned the top spot based on its statewide direct premium earnings of $4.8 billion. To see who topped the list, click through the slideshow included with this post. The Florida Health Insurance Providers list includes contact information, statewide market share and number of lives covered. We are currently surveying for our largest employers, commercial real… Reported by bizjournals 21 hours ago.
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Insuring illegal immigrants: California Legislature approves bill allowing families to buy plans through state exchange

June 3, 2016, 5:34 am
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Illegal immigrants would be allowed to purchase health insurance for themselves and their families through California's state-run marketplace under legislation that passed both houses of the Legislature this week with bipartisan support. Reported by San Jose Mercury News 19 hours ago.
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Shady Grove Fertility Helps Expand Maryland Mandate Coverage of Donor Sperm Treatment

June 3, 2016, 6:34 am
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Maryland’s Insurance Mandate is now expanded to allow couples with male factor infertility, which comprises up to 50 percent of infertility cases, to use donor sperm.

Rockville, MD (PRWEB) June 03, 2016

Maryland's Insurance Mandate has been expanded to allow couples with male factor infertility to use donor sperm. Thanks in part to Shady Grove Fertility physician, Stephanie Beall, M.D., Ph.D., who shared testimony with the Maryland Senate and House of Delegates in January 2016 on behalf of the Shady Grove Fertility patients who would benefit from and would need assistance of donor sperm to have a baby, as well as the fervent advocacy work of organizations like Resolve, the National Infertility Association, a Shady Grove Fertility partner. The Fertility Parity Bill was signed by Maryland Governor Larry Hogan on May 10th.

“It was an honor to work with Senator Kagan and Delegate Hill and give testimony on behalf of the many couples who need to use donor sperm to have a baby in the state of Maryland. By expanding the Maryland Insurance Mandate for fertility coverage, this will create an opportunity for many couples who would otherwise not be able to afford the care they need to have a child. Now we can help them make their dreams come true," said Stephanie Beall, M.D., Ph.D.

Why This Change Is Important
This amendment to the existing Maryland Mandate creates access to fertility coverage for more patients. An estimated 120,000 couples who live in Maryland will experience infertility—half of whom have contributing male fertility issues. This change provide coverage for donor sperm, enabling families who would otherwise be ineligible to use the Maryland Mandate and ultimately struggle to continue with treatment due to the financial barriers.

Maryland is one of just 15 states that have an infertility insurance mandate that requires health insurance plans to offer or provide coverage for in vitro fertilization (IVF) procedures. While this is benefit is advantageous to patients who are employed through the state of Maryland, there are some limitations. For example, employers with 50 or fewer employees, or religious organizations whose beliefs conflict with fertility treatment, are exempt from offering this coverage.

There have been progressive changes to the original law created in 1985. In 2015, the Maryland legislature updated the infertility insurance mandate to allow same-sex couples to use donor sperm, creating an inequality for heterosexual couples needing donor sperm to conceive.

According to Shady Grove Fertility’s Donor Program Director, Michele Purcell, M.H.A., R.N., “This is a huge step forward. In the past, many insurance companies excluded infertility coverage in the event an egg or sperm donor was needed; not allowing for reasons or causes behind the need for donor services. As a result of this exclusion, many patients were forced to stop treatment, or pay 100% out of pocket.”

Paul R. Shin, M.D., a Shady Grove Fertility reproductive urologist and male fertility specialist, also explains why this change is so important, “The prospect of helping couples to achieve their dreams of family building can take many different paths. For the majority of male factor infertility patients that seek their care here at Shady Grove Fertility, those dreams end with a happy healthy baby conceived from the sperm and egg of the male and female partners. However, some men have no sperm and some men with very poor sperm quality can go through an entire IVF cycle and have suboptimal fertilization and embryo development. Without this mandate, the use of donor sperm and the costs associated with uncovered cycles were a significant enough barrier that couples were forced to make a decision based solely on finances, cutting short their dreams of building a family.”

Why People Need Donor Sperm
The use of donor sperm spans more than LGBT couples. Of the one in eight couples who experience infertility, up to 10 percent of the patients with male factor infertility may be candidates for using donor sperm. For men with male factor infertility, there are a number of contributing factors that result in low quantity or poor quality sperm. Some men are simply born without the cells in the testicle that are needed for sperm manufacturing; while others have genetic problems that leave them with no sperm or very little sperm. Of men that do have sperm, there are cases when the sperm simply do not fertilize or promote good embryo development. In addition, men with cancer who have received chemotherapy often lose the ability to make sperm.

About Shady Grove Fertility
Shady Grove Fertility is a leading fertility and IVF center of excellence offering patients individualized care, innovative financial options, and pregnancy rates among the highest of all national centers. 2016 commemorates 25 years of Shady Grove Fertility providing medical and service excellence to patients from all 50 states and 35 countries around the world, and celebrates over 40,000 babies born—more than any other center in the nation. Today, 34 reproductive endocrinologists, supported by a highly specialized team of 600 urologists, Ph.D. scientists, geneticists, and staff care for patients in 18 full-service offices and five satellite sites throughout Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Washington, D.C. Shady Grove Fertility physicians actively train residents and reproductive endocrinology fellows and invest in continuous clinical research and education to advance the field of reproductive medicine through numerous academic appointments and partnerships such as Georgetown Medical School, Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, the University of Maryland, and the National Institutes of Health. More than 1,700 physicians refer their patients to Shady Grove Fertility each year. For more information, call 1-888-761-1967 or visit ShadyGroveFertility.com. Reported by PRWeb 18 hours ago.
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Hillary's Public Option Proposal: Could It Work?

June 3, 2016, 8:13 am
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A recent article in the New York Times highlighted a proposal by Hillary Clinton to bring back the public option as part of the Affordable Care Act, described as a move to the left toward Bernie Sanders' Medicare for All proposal. Her further suggestion was to consider voluntary buy-in to Medicare for people 50 or 55 years of age and up. Beyond the headline, there was no substance to her proposal. (1)

Although she claims expertise in the health care area, Hillary Clinton has never developed a health care plan that would work to assure access to affordable quality health care. The Clinton Health plan in 1993-1994 was byzantine in its complexity and never got out of a House committee to a vote on the floor. Speaking to a group at Lehman Brothers Health Corporation in 1994, she called single-payer national health insurance inevitable if health care reform was not effective by 2000. (1) Now she opposes that and maintains support for the Affordable Care Act (ACA), enacted in 2010, but with her suggested "improvements."

As the ACA was being put together in 2008 and 2009, the public option was conceived as a way to inject more competition into the health insurance industry. As a not-for-profit option on the exchanges, it was thought that it would provide greater value of coverage at lower cost. Although initially part of the ACA as it worked its way through congressional committees, it was bitterly opposed and soon killed by private insurers and other corporate stakeholders in the medical-industrial complex. It was also opposed by the American Medical Association, even though most physicians and health professionals supported the idea. An expanded Medicare also drew intense opposition from organized medicine and hospitals, mostly due to fears of inadequate reimbursement.

Now enter Hillary's 2016 claim that a public option and expanded Medicare buy in could improve the ACA and advance health care reform. Any chance of success? No way, if we look at evidence and experience!

For openers, both would again be fiercely opposed by the same opponents as before. A public option would not have worked before and will not work now by virtue of being too small and administratively more complex. It would be subject to adverse selection of sicker enrollees as private insurers continue to game the system in their own self-interest. Most of the not-for-profit co-ops started under the ACA have already died for these reasons. It is just a make-believe idea to think that a public option could increase competition today now that the industry has grown and consolidated to a point that just four or five insurers control most of the market. The insurance industry and its lobbyists would also kill early buy-in to Medicare without any trouble. Any thought that either a public option or early Medicare buy-in could be a transitional step toward single-payer is likewise out of the question.

We have to recognize soon that our present for-profit multi-payer financing system is actually a huge obstacle to reform. It is unsustainable become of its high costs and inefficiencies, its lack of price or cost controls, its restrictions on patients' choices of physicians and hospitals, and its increasing unaffordability for a growing part of our population. We still have 30 million Americans uninsured six years after the passage of the ACA, with a similar number underinsured. Hillary's proposals are unrealistic and naïve, as well as being inconsistent with her 1994 prediction of the need for single-payer financing by 2000 if reform had not been accomplished by then. Her latest proposal to resuscitate the public option as part of the ACA lacks any credibility, and she just seems to be posturing as an advocate for "reform." Adding a public option to the ACA today would just put one more ineffective Band-Aid on an already flawed multi-payer financing system.

As early as 2009, when the public option was being debated and killed as part of the ACA, Drs. Himmelstein and Woolhandler, internists and professors of public health at the City University of New York gave us two reasons why the public option can never work in this country:
1. It forgoes at least 84 percent of the administrative savings available through single-payer. The public plan option would do nothing to streamline the administrative tasks (and costs) of hospitals, physicians' offices, and nursing homes, which would still contend with multiple payers, and hence still need the complex cost tracking and billing apparatus that drives administrative costs. These unnecessary provider administrative costs account for the majority of bureaucratic waste. Hence, even if 95 percent of Americans who are currently privately insured were to join the public plan (and it had overhead costs of current Medicare levels), the savings on insurance overhead would amount to only 16 percent of the roughly $400 billion annually achievable through single-payer--not enough to make reform affordable.
2. A quarter century of experience with public/private competition in the Medicare program demonstrates that the private plans will not allow a level playing field. Despite strict regulation, private insurers have successfully cherry picked healthier seniors, and have exploited regional health-spending differences to their advantage. They have progressively undermined the public plan--which started as the single-payer for seniors and has now become a funding mechanism for HMOs--and a place to dump the unprofitably ill. A public plan option does not lead toward single-payer, but toward the segregation of patients, with profitable ones in private plans and unprofitable ones in the public plan. (3)
In the current important debate over the future of health care in this election season, we need a well-informed electorate on the issues. The media are derelict in not drilling down on the advantages and disadvantages of the three major alternatives to health care financing: (1) continuation of the ACA with improvements as necessary; (2) a Republican replacement plan, still in the works, after the ACA is repealed; and (3) single-payer national health insurance, Medicare for All, as proposed by Bernie Sanders, coupled with a private delivery system. We need integrity in proposals and fairness and accuracy in reporting to the public if we are to achieve the goal of universal access to affordable health care for all Americans.

visit: http://www.johngeymanmd.org

*References:*
1. Rappeport, A, Sanger-Katz, M. Hillary Clinton takes a step to the left on health care. New York Times, May 10, 2016.

2. Clinton, H. speaking to a group at Lehman Brothers Health Corporation, June 15, 1994. As reported by Health Care for All-WA Newsletter, Winter, 2015, p. 9.

3. Himmelstein, DU, Woolhandler, S. Public plan option in a market of private plans, March 26, 2009. Physicians for a National Health Program, Chicago, IL. www.pnhp.org

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website. Reported by Huffington Post 17 hours ago.
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Evergreen Health Cooperative's Beilenson says this $22M fee would be 'damaging' to business

June 3, 2016, 8:35 am
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Evergreen Health Cooperative could be forced to pay nearly $22 million to CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield as part of an Affordable Care Act provision that was initially designed to level the health insurance playing field. The fees are part of what's known as risk adjustment costs. The provision requires insurers who take on healthier patients to pay insurers who have sicker clients. For health insurance co-ops across the country, including Maryland's Evergreen, this could mean paying tens of millions… Reported by bizjournals 16 hours ago.
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Shameless Healthcare Cronyism Exposed In Connecticut

June 3, 2016, 9:42 am
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Shameless Healthcare Cronyism Exposed In Connecticut Submitted by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,



*People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty or justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary.*

– Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations



The best way to describe Obama’s entire sleazy reign is to liken it to a Potemkin village. Everything he’s done was designed for appearances as opposed to results. Actually, that’s not really true. Everything was done to help further enrich a handful of crony insiders while appearing to be working in the public interest.

One of the best examples of this is Obamacare. Superficially, more people have coverage, which sounds great in soundbites for propaganda purposes. Unfortunately, as I pointed out in the post,  *The Health Insurance Scam – “Coverage” Doesn’t Mean Affordability or Access*:

 



*Obama administration officials, urging people to sign up for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act, have trumpeted the low premiums available on the law’s new marketplaces.*

 

*But for many consumers, the sticker shock is coming not on the front end, when they purchase the plans, but on the back end when they get sick: sky-high deductibles that are leaving some newly insured feeling nearly as vulnerable as they were before they had coverage.*

 

*“The deductible, $3,000 a year, makes it impossible to actually go to the doctor,” said David R. Reines, 60, of Jefferson Township, N.J., a former hardware salesman with chronic knee pain. “We have insurance, but can’t afford to use it.”*



This is textbook Obama. You take a problem and pretend to fix it, but at the end of the day all you have created is a novel scheme to further enrich and empower entrenched interests.

Of course, the modern American economy is so unbelievably corrupt, this sort of behavior is happening constantly and throughout all levels of government. The most recent example has been uncovered by the always excellent David Sirota over at International Business Times. He are some choice excerpts from his  must read piece, Will Cigna And Anthem Merge? How Health Insurance Companies Pump Money Into Politics:



Is bigger necessarily better? That age-old question is no abstraction when it comes to your healthcare premiums, as Cigna and Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield are pushing to merge into the largest health insurance company in America. With consumer groups, physicians and hospital officials insisting that the consolidation threatens to limit medical care and jack up insurance prices for millions of Americans, regulators in one small state, Connecticut, are positioned to play a pivotal role in determining whether the companies get the approval they need.

 

The state is home to Cigna and has long been friendly to the industry, building up a reputation as the insurance capital of America. But some watchdog groups say that with a recent personnel move inside the state government, the friendship has gotten too close for comfort.

 

*When Anthem’s plan to acquire Cigna was being negotiated in early 2015, Connecticut’s Democratic Gov. Dannel Malloy appointed Katharine Wade as his state’s insurance commissioner: She was a longtime Cigna lobbyist whose father-in-law works at a law firm that lobbies for the company, whose mother and brother previously worked at Cigna, and whose husband still does. She was also a top official of the major lobbying group for the state’s health insurance industry.* *As commissioner, she appointed a top deputy who worked at Cigna and she had a former longtime Cigna employee serve as an agency counsel in the merger review. As Wade continues to oversee Connecticut’s review of Cigna’s merger, she recently secured a position chairing a healthcare policy committee for insurance commissioners across the country. Malloy’s decision to appoint Wade to such a powerful regulatory post on the eve of the merger was not made in a vacuum. It came after employees of Cigna, its lobbying firm Robinson & Cole and Anthem delivered more than $1.3 million to national and state political groups affiliated with Malloy, including the Democratic Governors Association (DGA), the Connecticut Democratic Party, Malloy’s own gubernatorial campaign and a political action committee supporting Connecticut Democrats.*



I know, it’s hard to wrap your head around the extent of that carousel of cronyism.



Malloy had previously served as a finance chairman of the DGA, was named DGA chair-elect in 2014, and assumed control of the organization as of late last year. In the 2016 election cycle, Cigna and Anthem have become among the largest donors to the group, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. In the midst of the merger push, Anthem has also hired public relations firm SKDKnickerbocker — the same firm that helped run Malloy’s first successful campaign for governor.

 

*“This looks like a conflict of interest, not a mere coincidence,” said Quickmire, whose group aims to reduce the influence of money in politics. “Hiring a lobbyist for the industry to be the regulator of that industry does not seem appropriate. She should not be in charge of the review, and people should definitely be worried that if she doesn’t recuse herself, the review will not be impartial.”*

 

For her part, Wade has already proven to be merger-friendly: In January, her department approved a controversial deal to combine Connecticut-based Aetna with Humana. Wade’s agency only announced that move last week, and its approval came without Connecticut regulators holding a public hearing on the matter — a move that drew scathing criticism from consumer and physician groups.

 

While criticism of her role mounts, Wade is taking a hands-on approach to the merger. Emails obtained by IBT make reference to her seeking biweekly conference calls with Cigna and Anthem about the companies’ progress on the merger with other state regulators. Visitor logs obtained by IBT show that during just the last eight months of 2015, Wade and her staff held 24 in-person meetings with officials from Cigna, Anthem or the companies’ lobbyists. *Wade’s agency has also worked with Malloy’s office on pushing new legislation — backed by the health insurance industry — that would empower Connecticut officials to shield financial information about the companies from open records laws.*



With regulators like these…

Meanwhile, how do the companies justify the merger? It’s for the good of the people! Of course it is.



Anthem and Cigna have presented a much cheerier view of what the future would look like if they receive regulatory approval for the merger deal they announced in July of 2015. The $48 billion transaction they proposed would create what the companies say is a conglomerate with more than 53 million members and more than $115 billion in annual revenues. On the basis of membership, the new firm would be the largest insurer in the United States. *With premiums and deductibles rising, company officials say that size will benefit consumers by empowering the company to squeeze savings out of the healthcare system, and promote the kind of collaboration that can help physicians more effectively treat their patients.*

 

“The combined companies will operate more efficiently to reduce operational costs and, at the same time, further our ability to manage what drives costs, helping to create more affordable healthcare for consumers,” said the companies in their joint website promoting the merger.



Now here’s the reality.



*An analysis by researchers at Northwestern University, the University of Pennsylvania and UCLA found that the 1999 merger of Aetna and Prudential “raised premiums by roughly 7 percent.” A subsequent study of Nevada markets affected by the merger between United Health Group and Sierra found that premiums jumped nearly 14 percent. And just last month, a study by University of California, Berkeley, researchers found that in the last few years, premiums rose faster in parts of New York where there was less insurer competition.* The same study found that consolidation did not have the same effect in California, but probably because state officials drove a harder bargain with insurers.

 

Insurance companies’ size, say experts, tracks their penchant for using market power to raise premiums, knowing it will be difficult for consumers to find alternatives.* A recent analysis published in the Journal of Technology and Science found that “the largest insurance company in each state on average increased their rates 75 percent more than smaller insurers in the same state.”*

 

“Insurance consolidation will tend to lead to lower payments to healthcare providers, but those lower payments will not be passed on to consumers,” Northwestern’s Leemore Dafny told a congressional hearing on mergers a few months after the announcement of the Anthem-Cigna transaction.

 

According to a recent analysis of market data by the American Medical Association, the merger would “raise significant competitive concerns” in Ohio, California, New York and Wisconsin, and further consolidate insurance markets in 10 other states where Anthem already operates. *The American Hospital Association estimates that more than 800 local markets serving 45 million people would see the companies gain market power and would subsequently “lack sufficient local competitive alternatives.*” In a separate study of the proposed merger, Edmund Haislmaier of the conservative Heritage Foundation noted that the main effect of the merger would be to enhance Anthem’s dominance of employer-based health insurance plans in the 14 states where it already operates.

 

*Physicians and the groups representing them have raised some of the strongest objections to Anthem’s proposed merger with Cigna. During a California hearing about the deal, physical therapist Dennis Langton testified that patients covered by both companies had experienced delays and retroactive denials for services deemed medically necessary by doctors.*

“We are dealing with two companies that have failed to administer their specialty networks in a manner beneficial to the consumers,” said Langton, who has practiced for 43 years in San Diego. “Allowing two dysfunctional programs to combine forces seems like a recipe for disaster.”



Doctors, what do they know? Much better to let a crony Cigna-linked regulator make all the tough decisions.



Matthew Katz of the Connecticut Medical Society told IBT that doctors in his state will see their bargaining power eroded.

 

“If one mega company is now 60 percent of the market but is a bad actor in that market, the patient and the physician are stuck, and the company can limit their network, tier their network and limit access to care,” he told IBT. “A physician may look at a network that is making it difficult to deliver necessary care, but when that network is 60 percent of the market, they can’t walk away from it.”



With that out of the way, let’s get back to the cronyism and Connecticut’s unique regulatory role in this charade.



To date, 12 states have approved the proposed Anthem-Cigna merger. However, few are positioned to play as big a role in reviewing the transaction as Connecticut, where Cigna has more than 4,000 employees and where Cigna and Anthem — if merged — would control roughly two-thirds of the state’s health insurance business. Because Cigna’s headquarters are just outside Hartford, the state’s regulatory actions could significantly complicate — or facilitate — the deal. *Though Connecticut has yet to act, regulators from across the country and at the federal Justice Department are looking to officials there for guidance on whether to approve or reject the merger.*

 

*In the years before the merger announcement, Connecticut Gov. Malloy had been helping Cigna. Shortly after donors from the insurance company and its lobbying firm pumped nearly $26,000 into groups supporting his 2010 election campaign, the governor’s administration announced it was delivering $50 million worth of state aid to the insurance company.* At the time, Malloy’s administration said the money was in exchange for Cigna’s commitment to create jobs in the state, but the terms of the deal allow some of the taxpayer largesse to continue flowing even if a merger is approved and the company subsequently sheds Connecticut jobs.

 

*Between Malloy’s 2010 election and early 2015 — when Cigna and Anthem were in talks about a merger — Malloy-linked groups had raised another $244,000 from donors at Cigna and its outside lobbying firm, Robinson & Cole, as well as more than $1 million from Anthem and Wellpoint. That is when Malloy nominated as state insurance commissioner Katharine Wade — who until 2013 was Cigna’s vice president for public policy as well as an officer of the Connecticut Association of Health Plans, the trade association that lobbies state officials on behalf of the health insurance industry.*

 

*Katharine Wade was a familiar name to Malloy. Her father-in-law, James Wade, had been an outside counsel to the Connecticut Democratic Party and was the chairperson of a political action committee that Malloy raised money for and that supported Malloy’s state party. He is also an attorney at Robinson & Cole — the firm that lobbies for both Cigna and the Connecticut Association of Health Plans. Malloy previously celebrated the firm in 2009 and later appointed one of its partners to a powerful judgeship.*



I feel dirty just reading this. 



*Malloy’s administration began preparing Wade’s nomination to head the insurance department in February 2015 — the same month Anthem deposited $250,000 into the coffers of the DGA, which had backed Malloy’s gubernatorial campaigns and which Malloy was slated to chair.* The donation was one of the largest the company had ever made to the group, according to federal records that date back more than a decade. Over the next three months, as Wade was formally nominated for the position, Anthem and Cigna would together give the DGA another $175,000.

 

Malloy’s office steadfastly stood by Wade amid the controversy. Emails obtained by IBT show that weeks after Anthem gave another $25,000 to the DGA, a senior Malloy aide told other officials in the governor’s office that Wade “dotted every i and crossed every t.”

 

In December, the state ethics office — whose board is dominated by appointees of Malloy and Democratic legislators — declined to endorse calls for Wade to recuse herself. The decision came weeks after Anthem poured another $120,000 into the Malloy-run DGA, which has now hauled in more than $510,000 from the two companies since the merger was announced.



Another perfect example of just how incredibly *sleazy and corrupt the U.S. banana republic has become.* Reported by Zero Hedge 15 hours ago.
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New GOP Health Plan Guts Health Reform

June 3, 2016, 10:35 am
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The new health plan from House Rules Committee chair Pete Sessions and Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee member Bill Cassidy would end or undermine all major elements of health reform, including its consumer protections, marketplaces, Medicaid expansion, and individual and employer mandates -- likely making millions more people uninsured and underinsured, particularly those with low incomes and pre-existing health conditions.  These facts contradict claims that the plan is a "compromise" that "breaks with conventional GOP orthodoxy" simply because it wouldn't repeal health reform outright. The bill would repeal most of health reform's market reforms and consumer protections.  Insurers in the individual and small-group markets could again charge higher premiums to people with pre-existing health conditions, drop or limit coverage of essential health benefits such as maternity care and prescription drugs, and charge unlimited deductibles, co-insurance, and copayments.  And insurers could offer "limited benefit plans" with annual dollar limits on benefits.The bill would let states retain the health reform protections but require them to take action to do so.  States, of course, could have imposed those requirements on insurers before health reform and the vast majority didn't.The bill also would repeal health reform's individual and employer mandates, likely leaving many fewer people with health insurance, relative to current law.  As we've explained, the individual mandate leads many more people to enroll in job-based coverage, Medicaid, the Children's Health Insurance Program, individual-market coverage (such as through the marketplaces), or other coverage sources.  Similarly, the employer mandate encourages employers to newly offer (or keep offering) their workers affordable coverage.  (The bill substitutes other, less effective policies to encourage people to have coverage, such as a state option to automatically enroll people who were uninsured in high-deductible health insurance, and allowing insurers to charge higher "late enrollment" premiums.) The bill would provide a new tax credit that people could use for individual-market coverage (inside or outside the marketplaces) or job-based coverage.  But people who used the credit would be barred permanently from receiving marketplace subsidies.  And the credit would be a uniform amount that wouldn't adjust by income or the cost of available, comprehensive coverage, so it would be worth much less than marketplace subsidies, particularly for those with lower incomes or pre-existing conditions.The bill's authors claim that current marketplace enrollees could retain their coverage.  While the bill wouldn't repeal existing marketplace subsidies, these would only be available in states that still had a marketplace offering "silver" plans.Moreover, there's no guarantee that insurers would continue offering comprehensive, health reform-style coverage or participate in any marketplaces that might still exist.  Since they could widely offer low-cost plans with far less comprehensive benefits, attracting healthier people away from marketplace coverage and leaving the pool of marketplace enrollees costlier to cover, premiums for marketplace plans would soar.Finally, the bill purports to leave health reform's Medicaid expansion in place but would pare eligibility for adults to 100 percent of the poverty line, down from 138 percent.  Moreover, it would establish a "per capita cap" for Medicaid, substantially reducing federal Medicaid funding over time, relative to current law, with cuts growing each year.  That would effectively raise state costs of the expansion, likely discouraging more states from adopting the expansion and causing many others to drop it.  States also would likely have to make deep cuts to eligibility, benefits, and provider payments for the rest of their Medicaid programs as well.In sum, this bill isn't a compromise or an overdue acknowledgment that health reform is here to stay.  While stopping short of fully repealing health reform, it would ruin the historic progress that health reform has brought about.Off the Charts, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities' blog
*More on this Topic*· GOP-ers' Health Plan Would Make Millions More Uninsured, Analysis Shows

· Previewing a House GOP Leaders' Health Plan

· Republican Study Committee Health Plan Would Likely Result in Many More Uninsured and Fewer Consumer Protections

· States Not Expanding Medicaid Falling Further Behind Expansion States

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website. Reported by Huffington Post 14 hours ago.
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Paul Ryan Stood Up To Donald Trump, Right Up To The Moment He Caved

June 3, 2016, 10:51 am
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Donald Trump has made at least one valuable contribution to the political debate: He has exposed Paul Ryan as America’s most overrated elected official.

Within the political establishment, particularly its conservative elements, Ryan has a reputation as a man of character and substance. It’s been that way ever since Republicans took over the House in 2010, and Ryan, as chairman of the Budget Committee, began proposing ambitious fiscal policy changes including dramatic, politically risky cuts to Medicare and Medicaid. The reputation only grew when, last year, Ryan became speaker thanks in part to the trust he’d built up among warring Republican factions. Google his name and you’ll find it associated with terms like “political courage” and “The Thinker.”

Ryan’s record as a policy entrepreneur hasn't exactly matched the hype. Ryan promotes himself as a hard-nosed fiscal conservative, willing to confront difficult choices in order to reduce budget deficits and keep the national debt under control over the long run. But Ryan's proposals have been full of gimmicks and unrealistic assumptions that hide the true costs of what he has proposed. Ryan professes a strong interest in fighting poverty, and has famously taken reporters along for tours of soup kitchens and social programs. At the same time, Ryan has proposed budgets that would finance massive tax cuts for the wealthy with deep cuts to programs that provide the poorest Americans with food, health insurance and other basic necessities.

Still, Ryan seems to have a genuine interest in policy. That is more than you can say for most of his colleagues on Capitol Hill. And over the last year, as Trump has said one outrageous thing after another, Ryan has spoken out forcefully. 

When Trump proposed a temporary ban on Muslims entering the U.S., Ryan said, "This is not who we are as a party or a country." When Trump appeared to condone violence by his supporters, Ryan said, "Nobody should say such things in my opinion because to even address or hint at violence is unacceptable." And when Trump declined to disavow support from David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan leader, Ryan said, "If a person wants to be the nominee of the Republican Party, there can be no evasion and no games. They must reject any group or cause that is built on bigotry."

The condemnations were among the strongest by any Republican not challenging Trump for the the party’s presidential nomination. And they mattered because they came from the man who is, by any reasonable standard, the Republican Party’s leader. In fact, Ryan’s criticism of Trump gave hope to the conservative intellectuals leading the “Never Trump” movement.

Many of those intellectuals, to their credit, have remained steadfast in their opposition to Trump. But Ryan is not an intellectual and, on Thursday, it showed.  

Writing for his hometown newspaper, The Janesville Gazette, Ryan announced that he would be supporting Trump for a very simple reason: Trump would endorse and sign the initiatives House Republicans hope to pass next year, while Hillary Clinton, the likely Democratic nominee, would not. “It’s no secret that he and I have our differences,” Ryan wrote. “And when I feel the need to, I’ll continue to speak my mind. But the reality is, on the issues that make up our agenda, we have more common ground than disagreement.”

On this, Ryan is almost certainly correct. Trump has given conservatives plenty of reason to doubt his commitment to their cause. The real estate mogul has no governing record with which to establish a baseline of his beliefs, while Trump’s sentiments about many policies seem to change by the day. At various points, he has endorsed ideas like single-payer health insurance that are too liberal even for many Democrats.

Still, Trump is a creature of corporate America, whose allegiances traditionally lie with the GOP. He has proposed a massive tax cut for the wealthy, showing fealty to the cause the conservative movement holds most dear. The clearest pledge he’s made, to build a wall along the border and to deport massive numbers of undocumented immigrants, is, if anything, too extreme for many Republicans. However loose his allegiance to conservative orthodoxy, Trump as president would surely support more of the Republican agenda than Clinton would.

But the objections about Trump that Ryan raised publicly over the last few months weren’t strictly or even mostly about ideology. They were about basic values and temperament.

Ryan rejected the Muslim ban because because it is un-American to judge a person by his or her faith -- and because merely proposing the ban reinforced prejudices against a group already facing discrimination and even hate crimes. Ryan spoke out against Trump’s comments on violence because responsible leaders grasp the importance of civility and order -- and recognize the ease with which, even in a stable democracy like this one, mobs can quickly get out of control. Ryan attacked Trump’s nonchalant response to the Duke endorsement because he realized that the proper response to bigotry is to condemn it, instantly and loudly.

Or maybe Ryan didn’t believe all of those things. Maybe Ryan made those statements simply because he worried that association with Trump’s statements and sentiments would tarnish the Republican brand. And maybe he’s decided to endorse Trump now because the polls suggest Trump will be a strong presidential candidate in November -- if not strong enough to win the presidency, then at least strong enough to avoid hurting Republican candidates for state and other federal offices.

That theory would explain why Ryan gave his endorsement without extracting so much as a token apology from Trump on the Muslim ban, the prior comments about violence and Duke, or any of the dozens of other outrageous things Trump has said and done in the last few months. Why force the party’s candidate for president to grovel when doing so might diminish his chances to win the election? Why risk alienating the hordes of Trump enthusiasts, who constitute a significant part of the Republican Party’s base and seem either unbothered by or enthusiastic about Trump's ugliest sentiments?

All elected officials confront tradeoffs between what they think is right and what they think they must do to win. The test of political character is where they strike the balance. Ryan was supposed to be one of those leaders who cares enough about principle to take major political risks from time to time. It now appears that he is an ordinary politician, the type who shows courage right up to the moment it matters.

Editor's note: Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims -- 1.6 billion members of an entire religion -- from entering the U.S.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website. Reported by Huffington Post 14 hours ago.
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Why A Healthier Company Is A Stronger Company

June 3, 2016, 4:30 pm
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There’s a lot of concern regarding the health of the average American worker, with 35% being labeled as obese. Increasingly, American companies are realizing that they have to pay more attention to the health of their employees. Some organizations have even taken it too far by implementing unavoidable health screenings.

While you should never invade the privacy of your employees, knowing how to encourage healthy eating through diet meal plans and exercise via group exercise classes can pay dividends.

You are going to learn about why a healthier company is a stronger company.

*Less Lost Work Days*

Every single year hundreds of thousands of work days are lost due to illnesses like migraines. Furthermore, in most cases these illnesses could be avoided by becoming healthier in the first place. The common cold, for example, could be avoided through having a stronger immune system.

Work days are crippling for companies. You have to bring in extra help, or your existing staff members have to cover for the extra work. Not to mention the fact that it can put more strain and stress on the current staff, consequently weakening their immune systems and making it more likely that they are going to experience health problems later on.

Fewer work days lost means more money, less stress, and a happier workforce.

*Improve Staff Morale*

Do you know why a healthier company is a stronger company?

You are showing that you care about your workers. By taking an interest in how healthy they are you are demonstrating that you want to do your best for them. And that’s going to improve staff morale. When you care about your employees they are more likely to care about your company.

In the long-term, this is going to lead to better performance and higher staff retention rates.

*Saving Money*

One of the excuses that organizations give for not implementing wellness programs is that they say it costs too much. They just don’t have the space in the budget to manage it at the moment. It does require some form of investment, but in the long-term you are going to make that investment back many times over.

As you already know, the fewer workdays that are lost the more money it’s going to save you. You already know that higher levels of staff morale are going to improve your retention rates and make it more likely that your employees are going to stick with you.

But there’s the practical side that you have to think of. The chances are you have some form of health insurance policy. Covering medical bills for your employees can add up fast, especially when you consider the expensive medical system in the US. By keeping them healthy from the start, you can make sure that you don’t have to pay out anything more than necessary.

*How Do You Start Creating a Healthy Workforce?*

Creating a healthy workforce is about changing bad habits. You cannot force someone to do something they don’t want to do, and so you have to invest in education. Remember that many people will have to change the habits they have built up of a lifetime in order to get healthy. And you are always going to come up against some natural resistance.

For a start, you have to target healthy eating. Try to change the options available in the cafeteria. And follow through on your healthy eating preaching’s by doing it yourself.

Then you need to think about how you are going to get people moving. There are numerous strategies you can employ to get people moving, and it doesn’t have to involve working up a sweat. For example, you could implement walking board meetings. Have your meeting while walking around a nearby park.

You can even start some group exercise classes during the lunch hour. These are completely voluntary, but once you get one or two people moving the rest will want to join in.

*Last Word – Getting People Healthy Takes Time*

You have to lead by example if you are going to encourage people to improve their lifestyles. That means you have to make a commitment to yourself. Make sure that you do this in a way that isn’t pushy. You shouldn’t put anyone under an unnecessary amount of pressure to get healthy, otherwise, you could cause a backlash among your workforce.

This is ultimately a process that takes time and you are going to have to work at it in the long-term.

How will you get people healthy today?

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website. Reported by Huffington Post 8 hours ago.
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13 Of 23 Co-Ops Created Under Obamacare Have Failed

June 3, 2016, 5:19 pm
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13 Of 23 Co-Ops Created Under Obamacare Have Failed Submitted by Ali Meyer via FreeBeacon.com,

*Ohio’s InHealth Mutual co-op announced last week that it is going out of business, making it the 13th co-op to fail out of the 23 that were created under Obamacare.*

The Ohio Department of Insurance asked to liquidate the company, saying that the company was in a “hazardous financial condition.” The co-op served nearly 22,000 consumers who now have 60 days to find another policy offered by another company on the federal exchange.

*“Our examination of the company’s financials made it clear that the company’s losses would prevent it from paying future claims should its operations continue,” *said Ohio Director of Insurance Lt. Gov. Mary Taylor. “Under Ohio law, we acted with certainty to protect the consumers.”

The company recorded an underwriting loss of $80 million in 2015 despite the $129 million in taxpayer-backed loans granted to the co-op by the federal government. InHealth Mutual was also placed under “enhanced oversight,” one of three tools the Department of Health and Human Services has to monitor co-ops in financial distress. When a co-op is placed under enhanced oversight, it means the company is consistently underperforming and allows the department to give detailed and more frequent reviews of the loan recipient’s operations and financial status.

*According to Columbus Business First, medical claims were coming in at a rate of $3 million per week and the company would have had to raise premiums by 60 percent in 2017 to keep up.* If InHealth Mutual were to stay in business through the end of 2016, projections show that the company would have posted losses of $20 million.

*Ohio’s failed co-op is added to the list of 12 co-ops that have already failed in Arizona, Michigan, Utah, Kentucky, New York, Nevada, Louisiana, Oregon, Colorado, Tennessee, South Carolina, and a co-op that served both Iowa and Nebraska.*

Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services chief operating officer Mandy Cohen told lawmakers in February that eight of the 11 remaining Obamacare co-ops in operation were selected for “corrective action plans” and “enhanced oversight.” She did not disclose which co-ops were placed on these plans.

A professor who specializes in economics and health insurance told lawmakers in March that closures of the remaining co-ops seem likely.



*“The future of the 11 co-ops still providing coverage in 2016 is uncertain, but future closures seem likely,”* said Dr. Scott Harrington. *“The 10 co-ops still operating with June 30 financials reported a cumulative loss of $202.3 million.”*

 

*“Very little, if any, of the $1.24 billion in federal start-up and solvency loans to establish those co-ops will be repaid,* and at least several will be unable to meet all of their obligations to policyholders and health care providers,” he said.



The Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to requests for comment by press time.

*  *  *

Mission Accomplished? Reported by Zero Hedge 7 hours ago.
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Bernie Sanders fans simmer in Fairfield, Berkeley

June 3, 2016, 8:33 pm
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“Let me thank all you crazy people for coming out on a day like today,” said the Vermont senator, clutching a water bottle. In his 30-minute stump speech to about 1,000 of the faithful, Sanders lost no time laying into such favorite targets as Wall Street, climate change, GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump, fracking, student debt and federal immigration policy. Later, in Berkeley, Sanders focused on income inequality at a news conference in the University of California’s Institute for Research on Labor and Employment. Emphasizing his key points with familiar rat-a-tat-tat hand gestures, the Democratic candidate advocated for a higher minimum wage, tuition-free universities and a tax on carbon. Asked by a reporter how he expects to create more jobs than the presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump, Sanders shot back: “Trump has also created four bankruptcies.” Many supporters used their blue “A Future to Believe In” signs to fan away the 99-degree heat — when TV cameras weren’t pointing their way. “I understand that brilliant meteorologist and brilliant scientist Donald Trump is in California and this incredible genius has concluded there is no drought in California,” Sanders said, as the crowd laughed. Sanders asked for a show of hands from students who had racked up tuition debt and from others who had no health insurance. The crowd arrived early and waited in a long line to clear the metal detectors and enter the central quad at Solano Community College in Fairfield. Half an hour before the Sanders arrived, his volunteers tried to get the people under some shade trees to come closer to the podium, within camera range. Sarah Roy of Fairfield paid $25 for a special tie-dyed Bernie shirt that looked like it might have been in fashion when Sanders was the age of a Solano College student. [...] as he left the building, fans thronged behind a row of caution tape on Channing Way, craning cell phones and screaming. Reported by SFGate 4 hours ago.
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Weekly Address: Building on America’s Economic Recovery

June 4, 2016, 4:04 am
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WASHINGTON, DC — In this week's address, the President discussed his return to Elkhart, Indiana, the first town he visited as President and one that was among the hardest-hit by the worst economic crisis of our lifetimes. Seven years later, unemployment in Elkhart has fallen from a high of nearly 20 percent to around four percent; more families are back on sturdy ground; more are covered by health insurance; and more students are graduating from high school. Elkhart is symbolic of America’s recovery, and that progress is due to the sacrifices of hardworking Americans and a series of smart decisions the President made early in his presidency, such as rescuing the auto industry, helping families refinance their homes, and investing in job training, high-tech manufacturing, clean energy, and the infrastructure that creates good new jobs. The President emphasized that we must continue to come together around common economic goals and push back against policies that protect powerful interests instead of working Americans. That’s the choice America will make this year, and the President believes the future will be brighter if this country works together to build on the progress this country has made in the months and years ahead. 

Transcript | mp4 | mp3 Reported by The White House 21 hours ago.
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The Affordable Care Act and Medical Malpractice Reform

June 4, 2016, 4:59 am
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The goals of health care reform are to ensure that everyone has access to high quality care and the care is affordable. Most providers believe that significant cost savings would be realized if there was meaningful tort reform. In fact, when the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was being crafted, there were numerous discussions relating to the limitation of future damages for patients injured by medical negligence, modification of the collateral source rule, and funding to the states for experimentation on litigation alternatives or substitutes.

Unfortunately, the only part of the ACA relating to malpractice reform to be passed was section 10607 of the Act which, "authorize[s] the Secretary of Health and Human Services to award demonstration grants to states for the development, implementation, and evaluation of alternatives to current tort litigation." This section does not eliminate malpractice litigation; it will only look at alternative ways of resolving the cases. The risk to providers remains. Malpractice coverage will still be required to practice and losses can be catastrophic. Even if a verdict is within the limits of the coverage, the provider who is found liable will be reported to the National Practitioner Data Bank which could have significant detrimental consequences if he wants to move to a new practice or when his privileges are up for renewal at his current location.

With mandatory health insurance or Medicare and Medicaid, it was hoped that the 30 million uninsured in the country would be covered. With a ban on lifetime payout limits and a prohibition on insurers from excluding patients with pre-existing conditions, the duration of coverage was also significantly increased. With more patients covered and covered for a longer time, it is foreseeable that more malpractice claims will result.

Despite the passage of the ACA, physicians and other health care providers continue to practice "defensive medicine" in hopes of better defending or even preventing future malpractice claims. By ordering more tests and doing more procedures in hopes of covering all the bases and not missing any significant diagnoses, the goal is to avoid any future litigation; the extra procedures and tests may not be in the patient's best interests and some may even be harmful, but it was thought they would allow for an easier defense if faced with a claim.

There are several mandates under Obamacare which require significant expenditures on the part of health care providers. These expenditures have led to increased overhead costs which many, if not most, private practitioners are not able to meet. As a result, many providers are joining health care groups or hospitals whereby they become employees. The groups take care of the overhead costs and the providers are paid a salary.

One of the results of this practice model is that outpatient care and inpatient care is being divided. Patients are no longer the responsibility of a single practitioner. They may see a family practitioner in the office setting, but in-patient care will be provided by a hospitalist who has not yet had the opportunity to form a physician-patient relationship. The lack of this attachment is more likely to result in some animosity, especially if the hospital course does not go well. It cannot be good if the patient is viewed as a customer of the hospital as opposed to a person which the physician has gotten to know well.

When a physician becomes an employee, they are expected to follow guidelines and protocols many of which were approved by Medicare. If the physician is able to meet certain benchmarks outlined in Medicare, they will be rewarded with a share of the savings. Failure to follow these guidelines can lead to economic penalties; the provider is faced with a dilemma--do what he feels is best for the patient or face decreases in pay and, perhaps, even the loss of his job.

If the patient suffers harm, a medical malpractice suit is likely to follow. Then there is the issue of malpractice premiums. If the employer is paying the premiums, will the lawyer hired to defend the case be answerable to the employer or the physician? If this is not spelled out in the employment contract, the physician may need to hire his own attorney to be sure his interests are protected in the suit. This can be a significant expense.

The physician is caught in the middle. Too bad! The jury will not be sympathetic to the economic chains attached to the practice. The jury expects the physician to use his best medical/surgical judgment at all times. The standard of care is unchanged under the ACA; the physician will be expected to do what a reasonable physician would do if faced with the same or similar circumstances. I do not believe that economic considerations will be entertained in this analysis.

It looks like the ACA has created a health care environment where it is more likely for the provider to be the target of a malpractice suit. Although alternative forms of resolution will be investigated, the target will remain the same. Tort reform will likely be a slow process handled by the states. Physicians will vote with their feet. They will not stay where their financial well-being is at increased risk.

Dr. Weiman's website is www.medicalmalpracticeandthelaw.com

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website. Reported by Huffington Post 20 hours ago.
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Handout or no? Swiss mull $2,500 monthly income for all

June 4, 2016, 9:50 am
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Experts estimate a minimum of 2,500 Swiss francs ($2,560) per month is needed for an individual to make ends meet in wealthy Switzerland, where private-sector health insurance is required and the cost of living is sky-high. The Swiss government itself advises voters to reject the proposal, and polls suggest it will fail in a country known for free-market policies and a high-tech, capitalistic financial sector. Proponents, however, insist the time has come for a minimum monthly wage as sweeping 21st-century economic changes like robots displacing factory workers make jobs more precarious in the digital age. Possible ways of paying for it would include fees on salaries of people who earn more than the minimum, savings from welfare programs that would be discontinued and taxes or spending cuts in the state budget. The Dutch city of Utrecht wants to start a two-year experiment with a similar plan, handing money to residents who already receive welfare benefits. "Basic income is much more of a stimulant to employment and the economic activity of a country," he said, adding it would increase entrepreneurship because people would be less afraid about losing jobs and more willing to take risks. Reported by SeattlePI.com 15 hours ago.
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The Equal Sign Can Be A Real Bitch

June 4, 2016, 11:56 am
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The Equal Sign Can Be A Real Bitch Authored by StraightLineLogic's Robert Gore via The Burning Platform blog,

*If one had to choose a single symbol to represent the apex of human thought and achievement, a strong candidate would be the equal sign: =.* That sign says that the symbols and mathematical operations to the left of it are equal to the symbols and mathematical operations to the right. Furthermore, to retain equality, anything done to the left side of the equation must be done to the right side. The equation is the heart of elementary arithmetic, the most complex principals of mathematics and science and their real world applications, and everything in between. Only logical challenge can disprove an asserted equality, and no amount of wishing will turn an inequality into an equality. *The equal sign represents humanity’s capacity for ruthlessly pristine logic.*

Many people shun mathematics, science, and logic, seeking refuge in their antitheses. A good part of human intellectual history has been attempts to either ignore equalities or turn inequalities into equalities. Forgiving, sloppy, delusional illogic is usually collective. Every age has its particular refuges. Our age has rejected the mathematics of debt. What can logically not occur, a perpetual inequality—consumption greater than production— has become the foundation of the global economy. *As the tagline for Zero Hedge notes: “On a long enough timeline the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.” In the same vein, on a long enough timeline, consumption equals production. Understand that equality, and the future comes into stark relief.*

*Housing was the focal point of the last debt crisis. Old age funding—pensions and medical care programs—may well play that role during the next one*. The math is straightforward: over time contributions and investment returns (if any) must equal promised benefits. The current reality is also straightforward: aggregate contributions, even if augmented by sterling investment returns, will be nowhere near enough to fund promised benefits. Current government and central bank policies exacerbate the predicament, making the achievement of even minimal investment returns problematic. The pay-as-you-go structure of many old age funds, such as Social Security and Medicare, does not allow for any investment returns at all.

*It is easy for politicians to promise benefits and assume high investment returns*. It is much harder to make the required contributions, whose benefits are long term and promise no immediate political payoff, and to actually realize the assumed investment returns. Underfunding of an old age fund can persist for years, especially if the fund borrows money. At any positive interest rate, borrowing further unbalances the equation; debt service will always outweigh the funds received. Debt only delays the day when promises are broken and the benefits paid out are realigned with what the fund actually has. *Greece, Detroit, and Puerto Rico are the first chapters of what promises to be a very thick book.*

Many of the governments facing actuarial imbalance do their best to make it worse. Contributions to old age funds come from the real economy, which is also where investment returns are generated. *If there is a government on the planet that has improved the functioning of its economy over the last few decades, we are unaware of it*. Dwindling growth (charitably defined as that benchmarked by official government figures) in the US, Europe, Japan, and China confirms that assertion. The ever-expanding Federal Register is emblematic of regulators gone wild, not just in the US, but around the world, and debt is a “gift” that keeps on taking. Most of the world’s $225 trillion pile of debt has paid for consumption or zero sum speculation. By definition these activities do not generate a return in excess of debt service, consequently their associated debt acts as an economic drag.

*Central banks pushing down interest rates, in many cases to negative territory, kills old age funds dependent on investment returns*. Most such funds are still assuming they can generate an annual 6 or 7 percent return, but if interest rates on safe debt are in the 2, 1, or -1 percent range, they have to take more risk to hit their targets. Taking more risk means investing more in equities and long-dated bonds. By most measures stocks are at the high end of their valuation ranges, and investing in them is especially dicey with governments and mounting debt gumming up economies. Long-dated bonds are most subject to interest rate risk should central banks find themselves unable to continue suppressing rates.

*Such suppression encourages debt and discourages saving*. Debt only makes sense when it is used to generate a return greater than the costs of debt service. Saving that funds productive investment is the true foundation of long term progress and economic growth. Dwindling savings further erodes the ability of the real economy to fund the contributions necessary to maintain old age funds’ solvency.* If having children is thought of as “saving” for old age security, and in less developed countries that is often the literal case, then contributions are also facing a demographic “savings” deficit. *In virtually every developed country, including China, over the next few decades the percentage of elderly will dramatically increase relative to the younger population that will supposedly support them (see links here and here).

*Promised old age benefits are for income and medical care, and the funding gap for the latter is even greater than the former. *In the US, decades of government intervention in medicine have produced almost complete separation of those receiving care from those paying for it, competition-destroying, cost-increasing concentration in the medical, drug, and insurance industries, and now Obamacare, which has exacerbated existing problems and created new ones. It relies on the healthy subsidizing the unhealthy and the more affluent subsidizing the less. Not surprisingly, the healthy and affluent are either shunning or subverting the system and insurance companies are fleeing unprofitable markets. Those who remain are seeking hefty premium increases. *So add costly, convoluted, and inefficient medical and health insurance systems to the factors contributing to the unsustainable old age funding inequality.*

*That inequality propels mounting global debt, which has papered over shortfalls. That works until it doesn’t. *Crashing commodity prices, sputtering economies, the frantic, counterproductive exertions of governments and central banks, and rising dependency ratios (the ratio of the dependent to those who support them) mean the reckoning is at hand. *Whether or not anybody wants it or plans for it, benefits are going to align with the actual resources available to pay them, just as house prices aligned with economic reality during the last crisis. Unfortunately, this alignment will be far more severe than that one.*

*That equal sign can be a real bitch.* Reported by Zero Hedge 13 hours ago.
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Morning roundup: Health premiums going up; Gas prices rising, Demos want special finance session

June 6, 2016, 4:00 am
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Health premiums going up People who buy health insurance on their own could pay up to 49.4 percent more for insurance next year, the Wichita Eagle reports. This comes after a year of rate increases that ranged up to 25 percent for those groups. The rates apply to those who purchase health policies directly from an insurance company or from the government’s health exchange. Small businesses that buy group insurance policies for their employees also are likely to see an increase. Gas prices continue… Reported by bizjournals 2 days ago.
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Recent Study Shows Insurance Companies Moving Towards Wearable Technology for Big Data Analytics

June 6, 2016, 5:06 am
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Quadrant Information Services sees potential major benefits to the insurance industry from the use of individual monitoring technology—but to realize that potential, carriers will need to develop a higher level of mutual trust with their customers.

Pleasanton, CA (PRWEB) June 06, 2016

The combination of miniaturized data collection devices and powerful big data analysis is beginning to have what could be a transformative effect on the insurance industry, says Quadrant Information Services, a leading technology supplier to property and casualty carriers. Health-related wearables—such as the Fitbit Flex or the Jawbone UP, for example—used by many Americans to track their physical activity or vital signs, are playing a new and rapidly growing role in setting rates for health insurance.

According to a recent study conducted by Boston-based research group Strategy Meets Action, while only three percent of health insurers are currently using wearable devices to help set individual rates, nearly 22% of health insurance carriers are in the process of developing a strategy to deploy such devices. Other studies have predicted that wearable technology will become mainstream in the insurance industry within the next two years. The basic idea is simple: by monitoring heartbeat, exercise, height/weight ratios and other indices, insurers will be able to offer lower rates to customers who maintain an active and healthy lifestyle.1

“In many ways, this is a terrific idea,” commented Quadrant CEO Michael Macauley. “It offers carriers a much more nuanced approach to rate-setting, and for many consumers it could offer lower insurance costs. It could also, by focusing attention on day-to-day fitness, have a beneficial effect on the nation’s overall health.”

Macauley notes that there are some issues regarding this technology that need to be carefully handled, among them data security and privacy. The benefits, however, are compelling, and both employers and carriers are beginning to find ways to implement the technology without alienating customers.

For example, the CEO of Appirio, a tech company headquartered in Indianapolis, reports that about 400 of his 1,000 employees participate in a voluntary program that includes uploading their activity with Fitbit. By sharing the data with his company’s health care provider, he was able to negotiate $300,000 off of his company’s $5 million in annual insurance costs. “We had an initial batch of data about people who had lost weight, and people who had moved from high to moderate risk. When we could show all that to our insurer, that’s pretty powerful.”2

Auto insurance, per Macauley, is another area in which monitoring technology is enabling a new approach to risk evaluation and rate-setting. Auto insurers such as Progressive and Metromile in the U.S. (as well as Tesco Bank in the UK and Generali Group in Italy) are monitoring their customers’ driving and offering lower rates to safer drivers. Noting that the safest drivers are, statistically, those who drive relatively little, Metromile installs monitors in its customers’ cars and offers annual premium savings of up to $500 per year to drivers who travel 200 miles or less per week.3

Sensor technology is also offering ways to lower costs for even the most expensive covered class of drivers, young men. BBC News recently reported on the case of a Progressive Insurance employee named Dave Pratt, who convinced his teenage son to install the firm’s Snapshot sensing device in his new Jeep. Snapshot is known in the business as a “telematics device”; it constantly monitors the speed at which a car is driven and the number of miles driven, and records incidents such as sudden stops. “Now that we can directly observe how people drive, we think this will change the way insurance works. Eighteen-year-old guys pay a lot for insurance, but some 18-year-olds are really safe drivers, and they deserve a better deal,” Pratt said.4

And not only drivers, but the roads they drive on, are being measured and analyzed. According to the latest statistics from the U.S. Department of Transportation, weather-related crashes make up 23% of all vehicle crashes in the country. Researchers from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers have found a way to detect when roads are dangerously wet by using an artificially intelligent neural network of computers, which could help drivers—and, eventually, self-driving cars—stay safe during bad weather.5

Quadrant Information Services, which for 25 years has been devoted to providing increasingly better data analytics to property and casualty insurers, is firmly convinced that personalized insurance based on big data analysis is the industry’s next step. This will require a very high level of trust between agent and customer—higher, perhaps, than has traditionally been the case. The rewards for building that trust, however, are compelling.

“Big data,” said Macauley, “will result in better coverage for customers and better control of cost and resources by carriers. And by raising awareness of the importance of healthy living, careful driving and safer roads, it will improve life for everyone.”

About Quadrant Information Services:

Quadrant Information Services, headquartered in Pleasanton, CA, provides pricing analytics solutions for property and casualty insurance companies. Quadrant gives actuary, product development, pricing, sales and marketing personnel at its client companies—which include all the major insurance carriers in the United States—the data they need to make accurate, data-driven decisions. An industry innovator since its founding in 1991, Quadrant has provided the P&C insurance field with a long series of technological advances—most recently InsureWatch, the industry’s first cloud-based pricing tool, which allows the user to produce unlimited combinations of reports with the click of a mouse. For more information, and to learn why Quadrant is recommended for insurance companies that are tired of losing the right customers and winning the wrong ones, please visit http://www.quadinfo.com.

1.    Srinivasan, Anand, “How Big Data & Wearable Technology Is Transforming The Insurance Industry, SmartDataCollective, March 14, 2016 smartdatacollective.com/anandsmartdata/395348/how-big-data-wearable-technology-transforming-insurance-sector.

2.    Satariano, Adam, “Wear This Device So the Boss Knows You’re Losing Weight,” Bloomberg Business News, August 21, 2014. bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-08-21/wear-this-device-so-the-boss-knows-you-re-losing-weight.

3.    “Pay-per-mile insurance is saving our customers an average of $500 annually,” Metromile Insurance. metromile.com/insurance/?utm_source=bing&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=2016B_S_Brand_AllStates&utm_term=metromile&utm_content=metromile.

4.    Gittleson, Kim, “How big data is changing the cost of insurance,” BBC News, November 15, 2013. bbc.com/news/business-24941415.

5.    Russon, Mary-Ann, “This is how self-driving cars can detect dangerous roads,” IB Times UK, December 8, 2015. businessinsider.com/this-is-how-self-driving-cars-can-detect-dangerous-roads-2015-12. Reported by PRWeb 2 days ago.
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Patients Rising Releases New Survey Showing That Hikes in Insurance Premiums, Higher Co-Pays and Health Plan Restrictions Keep Many Cancer Patients from Getting Prescribed Treatments

June 6, 2016, 5:11 am
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Patients Rising Releases New Survey Showing That Hikes in Insurance Premiums, Higher Co-Pays and Health Plan Restrictions Keep Many Cancer Patients from Getting Prescribed Treatments CHICAGO & WASHINGTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--A survey of cancer patients from Patients Rising and CancerConnect shows too often patients don’t receive the type of care they pay for and deserve because of issues with their health insurance. Reported by Business Wire 2 days ago.
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Buying Kidneys? Let's Treat Donors with Respect

June 6, 2016, 11:31 am
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America's kidney transplant system is in a state of permanent crisis. Over 100,000 people need new kidneys, and their ranks are growing quickly. Each year, 35,000 more are added to the list, and only 17,000 come off by receiving transplants; 4,400 drop off the list by dying, and 4,000 more exit because they have become too sick to transplant.

What is our country doing about this tragedy? Not enough. Donation rates have stagnated and in some ways declined. In 2001, 6,000 Americans became living donors. Last year, it was only 5,600. In between, the waiting list doubled. We need new solutions.

On Thursday, May 26th, Congressman Matthew Cartwright, who represents Scranton, Pennsylvania, introduced the Organ Donor Clarification Act to Congress. This act would allow pilots of non-cash incentives for organ donation, like tax credits and charitable donation. These pilots would be highly regulated and carefully controlled under the supervision of rigorous medical ethics boards--the kind we already trust to make hard decisions about health care.

There are not enough champions for patients with kidney failure in Congress. Cartwright, also a sponsor of the Living Donor Protection Act, is one of the most passionate. As a kidney donor who knows that some day my recipient, John, will likely need another transplant, the Congressman has my deepest appreciation.

In the days ahead, some will claim that piloting incentives for organ donation is an extreme or even repugnant solution. Don't believe them. Carefully testing incentives has broad support in the transplant community, including from past presidents of leading professional societies and from the directors of transplant programs like Mt. Sinai, Weill-Cornell, the University of Minnesota, and Ohio State.

I admit that treating organ donation like a market exchange raises troubling questions. Could it cheapen the act of donating, crowd out existing altruistic reasons to give, or confer favor on those most able to pay? This is why pilots need to be carefully designed. But given the death toll, it would be almost criminal not to test every possible ethical solution.

Yet there is another, better way to offer benefits to kidney donors: not as payment for their organ but as recognition for their public service. If there is any problem with the Cartwright proposal, it is its market purchase approach.

We should focus instead on what society owes kidney patients-- on treating kidney donors with the respect they deserve. This is not something that would need to be tested with pilots. Repaying this debt cannot wait.

Right now, kidney donors bear the financial costs of donation. We bear the medical risks entirely on our own. International standards call for lifetime donor follow-up, but the United States requires just two years, which is unacceptable. Our country has failed to respect the dignity of living donors.

And to be fair, part of this is because we donors haven't spoken up. For many of us, donation was among the proudest moments in our lives. We don't want to say anything negative that could be misinterpreted to imply we think people shouldn't donate.

Donation's not for everyone, but studies repeatedly find more than 95% of all living donors are satisfied with our decision. The long-term risks of donation are real but manageable. Donors are healthier than the average American before they donate and remain so afterward. Lifetime risk of kidney failure is lower in kidney donors (~1-2%) than it is in the general population (~3%).

But what demands we donors speak out are all the people who need a transplant and can't find a living donor. That's six out of seven patients on the waiting list. I picture their loneliness, their feeling like seeking donation would make them a burden to those they love; I think about their family members who attend funerals and wonder if they could have done more. It's heartbreaking.

Clearly, potential donors don't feel that society is doing everything it can to support their decision. And people who need kidneys are afraid to seek living donation as a result. Something needs to be done.

That something is justice for kidney patients. It requires a GI Bill for donation: free, lifetime health insurance for donors; payment of our lost wages; lifetime follow-up care and annual stipends for those who participate in research. It also means supporting the recipient by educating patients and their families about donation. Right now more than 75% of transplant recipients feel inadequately educated about living donation. Those are the people who get a kidney. Just imagine what it's like for everyone else.

By increasing donation, these policies would save taxpayer money. Each transplant saves the federal government nearly $150,000, far more than what the transplant support program above would cost per donor. Treating kidney patients with dignity would save both money and lives.

So Congressman Cartwright deserves all of our applause for his work to take on this critical but neglected issue. Researching incentives is worth doing, but let's also treat this as just one step towards the broader ethical commitment we need to make as a nation.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website. Reported by Huffington Post 2 days ago.
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