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Hospital Impact has been ranked one of the top 50 healthcare blogs by Wikio.
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I was wrong. I wrote that Scott Brown's victory in the Senate election in Massachusetts meant that we needed to pursue other areas of healthcare reform while Congress was embroiled in partisan gridlock. I did not expect passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (HR 3590) and Health Care and Education Affordability Reconciliation Act (HR 4872), but admit that their passage just before the Annual Congress of the American College of Healthcare Executives made for exciting discussions. Participants felt like we were part of the present.
Hence I "volunteered" to speak about the implications of healthcare reform in the chapel of a nearby church. I first disclosed that I had not yet read over 2,300 pages of the legislation and relayed that even though much is to be revealed as the Department of Health and Human Services drafts regulations, several provisions take place in 2010:
* Section 1101: Immediate Access to Insurance for Uninsured Individuals with a Pre-Existing Condition
Within 90 days of enactment, the Secretary shall establish a temporary high-risk insurance pool program. It will provide access to healthcare coverage for those who are particularly costly to insurers or cannot secure coverage from insurers due to pre-existing conditions. People with pre-existing conditions who have not had insurance for at least six months will receive access to coverage that exposes them to no more than 35 percent of the allowable costs of treatment with out-of-pocket caps at $5,950 a year for an individual or $11,900 for a family. Five-billion dollars is currently allotted for this program that will expire January 1, 2014.
* Sections 1102 and 10102: Subsidies for Employers Providing Coverage to Retirees
Within 90 days of enactment, the Secretary must create a program that provides reimbursement to employers whose group health plans cover individuals who retire, do not currently qualify for Medicare, and are between the age of 55 and the age they are on the date they become eligible for Medicare, up to age 65. Employers providing such coverage may qualify for reimbursement of up to 80 percent of the costs of providing the coverage to such individuals, when the costs exceed $15,000, but do not exceed $90,000. The reimbursement payments are to be used to lower the employer's plan expenses. Five-billion dollars in funding is provided for the temporary program, which expires on January 1, 2014.
Ken Cohn is a practicing general surgeon, MBA and CEO of HealthcareCollaboration.com. He divides his time between providing general surgical coverage and speaking, writing, teaching, and consulting on physician-hospital relations.
