Health junction

Rules for Employers with Grandfather Exceptions for the Health Care Mandates The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act mandates that employers with health care programs meet certain requirements for employee participation, coverage limits, and treatment of pre-existing conditions upon enrollment. Having just spent the past few days studying the grandfather provisions for the health care reform implementation in 2014, this article is meant to provide a bit of illumination to any confused employers or their staff. Generally grandfathered group health care programs will have a calendar year or a fiscal year plan renewal date. Since this is the time when changes are introduced each year, if a plan has a June anniversary date, it would have had to apply for grandfather status by the June 2011 anniversary. Hence the first anniversary of a grandfathered plan is likely to have occurred by now and this is the time when a plan administrator may be required to show the plan meets the PPACA ...

Despite the best efforts of health care reform detractors, the Supreme Court looks to have upheld the insurance mandate provisions as well as much of the rest of the edicts. A closer look at the impact on the Medicaid equalization will come after July 5th, when I return from holiday. Bon Voyage! healthpolicymaven

Having served as a health care and public policy book reviewer for the independent New York Journal of Books, I thought I would share some of the "good reads," with you as NYJB is closing its site. My latest review, "Breasts, A Natural and Unnatural History," by Florence Williams is featured on the banner page for the site. It is a historical, scientific, and anthropological review of breasts, sociologically, scientifically, and as a bell weather for toxins in our society. Florence Williams will be in Seattle this month reading from her book. http://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/review/breasts-natural-and-unnatural-history The best book I have read about the long term problems in United States health care delivery and what the 2010 reforms may mean is "The Battle Over Health Care, What Obama's Reforms Mean," by Rosemary Gibson and Janardan Prasad Singh. Singh is an economist with the World Bank and Gibson is formerly with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation,...

Why We Don�t Want To Get Rid of Medicare-Our Best Tool for Health Care Reform The pressure is on for federal budget slashing and of course social programs (not defense) are top-of-the-list for cost reductions, including the malignant call for block granting the Medicare program. Having previously analyzed the Bush Administration�s Deficit Reduction Act of 2005, including the odious federal government, �claw back provision� for reducing federal contributions for state Medicaid programs, this article reviews some potential impacts of a block grant or per capita allowance for Medicare participants. Parallels are drawn between the Medicaid changes and what may happen to Medicare if it is schlepped to the states. Finally, Medicare�s impact on overall health care policy making in the United States is analyzed. Would Block Granting Medicare Look like the Medicaid 1115 Waiver Plans? As of 2005, half the states already had approved Medicaid 1115 plans including: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Cal...

State By State Analysis of Public Health Service Act Requirements for Employers in the United States The Public Health Service Act of 2010 requires most employers in the United States to provide group medical insurance for their employees. Employers who choose not to comply with this law will be fined, as authorized in Section 490-H of the Internal Revenue Code. Employers with fifty or more employees are required to offer health insurance to their employees who work, on average, thirty or more hours a week. And the insurance plan must meet certain affordability standards, the employer must pay part of the cost and the plan has to meet certain eligibility requirements for enrollment equity. The global purpose of this act is to increase the proportion of people who have access to health care in the United States.   Evidence of the ability to pay for medical treatment through insurance thus contributes to this goal. The data source for the fifty-state-analysis, came from the Nationa...