Tag: health insurance

A Good Job to Have in America: CEO of Health Insurer

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❝ Do you ever wonder if you’re in the right industry, but the wrong profession?

Even though many major health insurance companies, like Aetna and UnitedHealth, are continuing to pull out of exchanges, most have seen their stocks nearly double since the Affordable Care Act was signed in 2010. Their executives have also cashed in with annual compensations that have been climbing alongside their companies’ stocks.

❝ Here’s what the high-rollers of health insurance get paid. We looked at publicly-traded companies, which have to reveal executive compensation in annual proxy statements submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Total compensation includes salary, bonus, stock and options (valued at grant date), incentives, and other benefits.

❝ Centene’s Michael Neidorff was the highest paid CEO, making $22 million in 2016. During a three-year period from 2014 through 2016, he made $62 million.

Like other health insurance CEOs, his $1.5 million-dollar salary only represented a small fraction of his income. Most of his compensation came in the form of stock awards — around $13 million worth each year.

Centene’s stock performed the best among these companies, nearly doubling over three years. A booming stock means Neidorff takes home even more than what’s reported to the SEC.

RTFA to see who owns the biggest pies. Ah, compassionate conservatism.

Obamacare’s individual mandate is working

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❝The individual mandate is among Obamacare’s most hated provisions. About two in three of Americans think the requirement to buy health insurance is a bad idea.

But recent enrollment data shows that the mandate is working. The exact type of people the requirement was meant to target — young, healthy adults who might forgo coverage were it not for a government fine — signed up in record numbers this year.

❝Having a decent number of young and health people in the insurance pool is integral to making costs affordable for everyone, which is exactly why the mandate exists in the first place. And architects of Obamacare’s enrollment strategy say that talking about the mandate — something Obamacare supporters didn’t really start doing until 2015 — has been core to making it work…

❝”The first year we were concerned it would be interpreted as a negative message, possibly turning people off,” says Anne Filipic, who runs Enroll America, a national nonprofit focused on getting the uninsured signed up for the health law’s insurance expansion.

But 2015 was different. Survey research had shown that, despite the mandate’s unpopularity, reminding the uninsured of the fees they’d face for remaining uninsured was an excellent way to encourage them to buy coverage. The penalty rose from $95 in 2014 to $695 in 2016…

New data suggests the new message was successful. In 2015, people under 35 made up 35 percent of Healthcare.gov’s open enrollment sign-ups. In 2014, the number stood at 33 percent. What’s more: Healthcare.gov netted 980,000 new enrollees under 35 this year, a big increase over the 670,000 new sign ups last year…

❝”The increase in young people is very encouraging,” she says. “The fine is going up, and we’re three years into this now. So the repeated message, seeing friends and family get coverage, all those things are now starting to come together.”

Americans are funny. We’re supposed to hate government unless it benefits us directly. So, insurance – when required – is something we try to avoid even though we benefit as individuals as much as collectively by costs coming down as a result of a broader compass of coverage.

So it was with auto insurance. So it is with health insurance.

Now, if we can only get the cretins in Congress to move ahead on single-payer provisions and negotiated prescription prices.

Cancer researchers “discover” Medicaid patients survive less time

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Measured concern from Republican governors

Looking only at highly treatable types of tumors, researchers found Ohio Medicaid enrollees were between 1.6 and 2.4 times as likely as other patients to die of their disease within five years…

“While Medicaid is potentially lifesaving, it is better to be able to support yourself and have insurance that protects at a higher level than just Medicaid,” added Dr. Derek Raghavan, who heads the Levine Cancer Institute in Charlotte, North Carolina.

And how likely is that while job-hunting amid the carnage leftover from the Great Recession?

Raghavan and colleagues looked at eight different cancers, such as testicular cancer and early-stage colon and lung cancer, in patients from an Ohio cancer registry. With treatment patients typically survive more than five years with those diseases, so doctors often refer to them as “curable…”

Of the non-Medicaid patients, fewer than one in 10 died within five years of their cancer diagnosis.

By comparison, more than one in five Medicaid patients died during that period, and those who enrolled in Medicaid later survived the shortest time…

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