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Archive for March, 2011
Use that computer well!
Thursday, March 31st, 2011 | Uncategorized | Comments Off
Are you ergonomic when you use your computer? Check out these tips to find out!
Understanding Identity Theft
Wednesday, March 30th, 2011 | Uncategorized | Comments Off
Your Identity Belongs to You. Protect It, Too.
One smart way to protect yourself against identity theft is to prevent it. If your identity is stolen, you’ll be able to lessen problems by acting quickly.
Start with Good Habits- Leave your Social Security card at home in a safe place
- Shred papers with personal information
- Reduce your credit card accounts, and carry only the cards you need
- Write checks with a permanent pen, and mail from a secure place
- Photocopy both sides of your credit cards and store safely
- Review balances and transactions often by phone or online
- Make sure every transaction on your credit card statements is accurate
- Take advantage of free credit reports (see sidebar) and watch for unusual activity
- Sign up with Experian, Transunion, and Equifax and stagger your requests to get a free credit report every four months or sign up for credit watch services which will report directly to you for a fee
- The FTC Theft Affidavit supplies proof that you didn’t authorize any accounts opened or debts run up by the identity thief
- New accounts need this FTC affidavit form to investigate the fraud and process your claim
- Call your existing accounts for instructions on disputing unauthorized charges as other forms may be needed
- Keep originals of the affidavit, and all supporting materials such as driver’s license or police report. Send copies only.
- Send quickly—many creditors request that you send the affidavit within two weeks
These are just a few tips to help you protect your identity. Did you know that identity theft protection is a coverage that can be added to most homeowners insurance policies?
For less than $2.00 per month, you can have this added protection. Contact Insurance Planning Alternatives today to learn more!
Virginia Files New Court Papers Arguing Federal Health Care Law Is Unconstitutional
Tuesday, March 29th, 2011 | Uncategorized | Comments Off
Virginia’s attorney general has filed additional court papers arguing that the Obama administration’s health care reform law is unconstitutional. The 69-page brief filed Monday urges the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to strike down the entire law. Read the entire article here.
Administration Delaying Some Rules For Appealing Health Insurance Denials
Monday, March 28th, 2011 | Uncategorized | Comments Off
The Obama administration is delaying until next January its enforcement of some new rules designed to protect patients who appeal insurers’ decisions to deny or reduce health care benefits.
In the meantime, the Labor Department said in a posting on its website that it will revise the requirements to deal with objections raised by insurers. These rules were mandated by the health care law, and federal officials had earlier said they would start enforcing them in July.
The delays were defended by the administration and the insurance industry but worry consumer advocates.
Among the rules now on hold are:
–A reduction in the amount of time an insurance company is allowed to review a denial of coverage in urgent cases, from no more than 72 hours to 24 hours.
–A requirement that insurers provide information about the denial and how to appeal in appropriate language for non-English speaking beneficiaries.
–A requirement that insurers must provide consumers with specific details, which would include diagnostic codes used by doctors, hospitals and insurers, about what treatment isn’t covered and why.
When the administration first released the appeals rules, it said they would go into effect last January. Last fall officials revised that timeline to say enforcement of some rules would not begin until July to allow insurers appropriate time to get procedures in place.
But the low-key announcement posted on the Labor website March 18 tells insurers and self-insured employers that the enforcement grace period has been extended until 2012 because the government intends to modify the rules “in the near future.” What those changes might be were not disclosed, but the prospect concerns consumer groups.
“We want to be sure that delays don’t mean it won’t happen,” said Cheryl Fish-Parcham, deputy director for health policy at Families USA, a health advocacy group.
“Once again the rights that were promised under the Affordable Care Act are going to be further delayed,” said Timothy Jost, a health law professor at Washington and Lee University School of Law and a consumer representative to the National Association of Insurance Commissioners.
The appeals announcement is the latest of several moves by the administration that slow down implementation of the health law. It has granted temporary exemptions to states seeking more time to comply with certain provisions of the law and given waivers to insurers offering limited-benefit policies known as “mini med plans.”
The government is “under a lot of pressure from businesses and insurers to make things work more smoothly,” said Jost.
But a Labor Department spokesman said in a statement that the new decision “struck a balance” in response to a variety of groups that had submitted comments on the rules, including health insurers, states, patient advocacy groups, employer-sponsored health plans and other.
In its comments to the government, America’s Health Insurance Plans, a trade association representing 1,300 insurers, said that providing detailed explanations to consumers using diagnostic codes would be an administrative burden and could even delay getting denial notices to beneficiaries. The group also said that since some urgent care decisions don’t involve emergencies, they don’t have to be made within 24 hours.
Translating appeals information to languages other than English would also create administrative challenges, the group said. The association’s spokesman, Robert Zirkelbach, said that it was better for consumers to talk to a live person who can answer questions rather than translating information in writing.
“The goal is to have a process that will work better and more efficiently for consumers,” Zirkelbach said.
One aspect of the new appeals rules that is not affected by the latest government announcement is the timeframe given to consumers to file an appeal. Under most plans, beneficiaries have 180 days after receiving a denial notice to request a review. The announcement also does not affect the right to appeal when coverage is canceled or denied because the treatment was not medically necessary, said Fish-Parcham.
A report released last week by the Government Accountability Office, the independent investigative arm of Congress, underscored the importance of appeals. The GAO analyzed data from four states and found that 39 to 59 percent of consumers succeeded in reversing a coverage denial when they appealed to their insurance company.
The suspended rules apply only to the first stage of an appeal, one that is filed internally with the health insurer and is required in most cases before the consumer can appeal outside the company. In February, 24 consumer organizations and patient advocates sent a letter to Health and Labor officials urging them not to relax some rules affecting the law’ provisions establishing the external appeals process.
This article was reprinted from kaiserhealthnews.org with permission from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent news service, is a program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health care policy research organization unaffiliated with Kaiser Permanente.
Flashback Friday! enjoy your weekend…
Friday, March 25th, 2011 | Uncategorized | Comments Off
Health Care Law’s First Anniversary: Why Haven’t Americans Seen Changes Yet?
Wednesday, March 23rd, 2011 | Uncategorized | Comments Off
It was a year ago that President Obama, after months of heated rhetoric, fiery debates and partisan wrangling, signed the historic health care bill into law.
“The bill I’m signing will set in motion reforms that generations of Americans have fought for and marched for and hungered to see,” the president said, as he swiftly turned the contentious bill into the law of the land.
The Affordable Care Act — dubbed “Obamacare” by critics — includes a number of significant changes to be rolled out piecemeal by 2014. Many have already been implemented, including those that benefit small businesses and Americans with pre-existing conditions. But many of these are targeted to a narrow group of people, such as the poor, those under the age of 26 and senior citizens. The major provisions in the law don’t take effect until 2014, until which time Americans may not see a significant change in their coverage.
Under the “grandfather provision,” the law also allows those Americans who like their plan to keep it so many in that group may not see any major changes either.
With insurance premiums rising rapidly, most Americans still don’t know what the health care law means for them. A poll conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation this month found that 52 percent of Americans don’t feel they have enough information about the health reform law to understand how it will affect them personally, compared to 47 percent who think they do. The numbers are very similar to those of a year ago, when 56 percent said they did not have adequate information.
Overall, 13 percent say their family has benefited from health reform over the past year, while 20 percent report having suffered a negative effect.
“I think part of the reason why there seems to be skepticism among the public or confusion among the public as to how they will be affected by the law is that the major provisions of the law, particularly around coverage and the expansion of coverage don’t go into effect until 2014,” said Jennifer Tolbert, a principal policy analyst at the Kaiser Family Foundation.
“Because of that most people have yet not seen a major change in their coverage or in the cost of their coverage and so they are somewhat concerned about what might come and not sure of what they can expect to see from them, from the law,” she added.
CNN Poll: Time doesn’t change views on health care law
Wednesday, March 23rd, 2011 | Uncategorized | Comments Off
(CNN) – One year after President Barack Obama signed the health care reform bill into law, a new national poll indicates that attitudes toward the plan have not budged.
According to a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey released Wednesday, on the one year anniversary of the signing of the law, 37 percent of Americans support the measure, with 59 percent opposed. That’s basically unchanged from last March, when 39 percent supported the law and 59 percent opposed the measure.
“It’s worth remembering that opposition to the bill came from both the left and the right last year, and that has not changed either,” says CNN Polling Director Keating Holland. “In 2010, about a quarter of the health care bill’s opponents disliked the bill because it was not liberal enough – the same as today. That works out to 13 percent of all Americans who oppose the bill because it did not go far enough. Forty-three percent oppose it because it was too liberal.”
The passage of health care reform was seen as the signature domestic achievement of the president’s first two years in office. The law was a major issue in the midterm elections and with many Republicans continuing to push to either repeal or defund the plan, health care will most likely remain a very important issue in the 2012 election.
In what was seen as a largely symbolic move, the GOP controlled House voted earlier this year to repeal the law. At the same time, a number of legal cases that aim to overturn the measure are advancing through the federal court system.
With all this in mind, the poll continues to indicate a partisan divide, but also a gender gap among people who oppose the health care law.
“Men and women dislike the new health care law in equal measure, but not necessarily for the same reasons,” Holland says. “Nearly all men who oppose the law do so because it is too liberal. But a third of the women who dislike the law feel that way because it is not liberal enough.”
The CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey was conducted March 18-20, with 1,012 people questioned by telephone. The survey’s overall sampling error is plus or minus three percentage points.
Two other polls released in the past week, by Gallup and Kaiser Family Foundation, also indicate that Americans are divided over the health care law.
– CNN Deputy Political Director Paul Steinhauser contributed to this report
Americans Remain Divided, Confused About Health Law As Anniversary Nears
Friday, March 18th, 2011 | Uncategorized | Comments Off
KHN Staff Writer
Mar 18, 2011
A year after Democrats in Congress pushed through the law overhauling U.S. health care, Americans remain as split as ever about it, according to a poll released today.
A survey this month by the Kaiser Family Foundation found 42 percent of Americans support the health law while 46 percent are opposed. Although both figures were down slightly from February, overall they have changed little since President Barack Obama signed the landmark bill into law on March 23, 2010. (KHN is an editorially independent program of the foundation.) The law, which will extend coverage to 32 million Americans, has come under a blistering attack from Republicans in Congress who are trying to repeal it and Republican governors who have filed suit seeking the Supreme Court to declare it unconstitutional.
The survey found last April that 46 percent of Americans favored the law and 40 percent opposed it. But both sides have been up and down since then, although neither side has been able to move beyond 50 percent over the course of the year.
Not surprisingly, public opinion of the law varies along partisan lines, with 71 percent of Democrats supporting the law while 82 percent of Republicans oppose it in the latest survey. Of those who oppose the law, 20 percent say they are most concerned about its costs, 19 percent are worried about the government’s role and 18 percent don’t like the law’s mandate that individuals get coverage.
The public also remains as confused about the law today as it was a year ago: About 53 percent of Americans said they are confused, the survey found. That is even more widespread among the uninsured and low-income Americans – the groups who have the most to gain from the law, particularly when most coverage expansions take effect in 2014. About six in 10 in these groups report a lack of understand.
Senior citizens, the vital voting bloc that gained several new benefits in the Medicare program from the law, remains the most skeptical age group, with 52 percent opposing the law. That’s down 7 percentage points from the February survey. About 39 percent of seniors believe Medicare will be worse off under the law, compared to 19 percent who think it will be better off. The health law extends the solvency of the Medicare Trust Fund by 12 years, gradually closes the gap in coverage in the Medicare prescription drug benefit and eliminates Medicare co-payments for many preventive services. Republicans have raised concerns about cuts in the growth of Medicare payments to hospitals and other providers that finance the law’s coverage expansions and reductions in payments to Medicare health plans under the law that could result in reduced benefits.
The poll also delivers some bad news for Republicans pushing for repeal of the law. Less than 40 percent of Americans favor repeal, with about 21 percent of respondents favor repealing the law and not returning to the issue, while 18 percent want the law repealed and replaced by a Republican alternative plan, the survey found.
The poll found that 21 percent of Americans would like to keep the law intact, while another 30 percent favor expanding it.
The Obama administration has said that it would favor allowing states to implement their own programs if those plans met the same standards for coverage and cost that the federal law demands. The poll found that two-thirds of Americans favor that option, but only if the states don’t offer insurance that is less generous than the federal plan.
The foundation conducted the telephone survey of 1,202 adults between March 8 and March 13. The margin of error was +/- 3 percentage points
This article was reprinted from kaiserhealthnews.orgwith permission from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent news service, is a program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health care policy research organization unaffiliated with Kaiser Permanente.
In Health Law, Rx for Trouble from the Wall Stree Journal
Wednesday, March 9th, 2011 | Uncategorized | Comments Off
By JANET ADAMY
Sandy Chung is grappling with a new kind of request at her pediatrics office in Fairfax, Va.: prescriptions for aspirin and diaper-rash cream.
The result is that Americans are visiting their doctors before making a trip to the drugstore, hoping their physician will help them out by writing the prescription. The new requirements create not only an added burden for doctors, but also new complications for retailers and pharmacies.
“It drives up the cost of health care as opposed to reducing it,” says Dr. Chung, who rejected much of a 10-item request from a mother of four that included pain relievers and children’s cold medicine.
Though the new rules on over-the-counter drugs amount to a small part of the massive overhaul of the health-care system, the unintended side effects show how difficult it can be to predict how such game-changing legislation will play out in the real world.
Some doctors, irked by the paperwork and worried about lawsuits, are balking at writing the new prescriptions. Pharmacists and retailers say the changes mean they have to apply a personalized label on some 15,000 different everyday products for customers paying with certain debit cards.
Health-policy experts predicted that new insurance pools for high-risk patients would attract so many expensive enrollees that funding would be quickly exhausted. In fact, enrollment is running at just 6% of expectations, partly because of high premiums.
A provision preventing insurers from denying coverage to children with pre-existing health conditions prompted insurers in dozens of states to stop selling child-only policies altogether.
And a piece of the law designed to centralize patient care by encouraging health-care providers to collaborate is running into antitrust concerns from regulators.
To the handful of congressional aides who came up with the idea to limit tax breaks on over-the-counter drugs, it was supposed to be a minor tweak to raise revenue and to discourage wasteful spending on health products.
Some 33 million Americans are in families that have flexible-spending accounts, which are funded through payroll deductions and allow consumers to pay for health expenses with tax-free dollars.
The change also applies to health savings accounts designed for consumers in insurance plans with high deductibles. If fewer people use these accounts to buy drugs, the government gets more tax revenue. Retail sales of over-the-counter medicines amounted to about $17 billion in 2010, not counting sales at Wal-Mart Stores Inc., according to Nielsen Co.
What the law’s writers didn’t anticipate was the determination of some people to squeeze every last drop of tax savings from their accounts.
Ms. Greer says her doctor wouldn’t write prescriptions without an office visit, so she went without the drugs. Later, she got the prescriptions from a doctor at the emergency room, where she was diagnosed with pneumonia.
“It feels like you’re begging for something when it’s your money,” she says.
Much of the health law, which passed last year despite overwhelming opposition by Republicans, doesn’t take effect until 2014. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has projected that an additional 32 million Americans will get insurance, and the law has already extended tax credits to small businesses for buying insurance and allowed many parents to keep their children on their health plan until their 26th birthday.
But opponents say it costs too much and gives the federal government too much control over health care. Republicans in the House voted this year to repeal the law, though the measure died in the Senate. Opponents are trying to get it struck down in the courts, a fight that is likely to last until at least next year.
A spokeswoman for the Treasury Department, which oversees tax policy, says the provision “enjoyed bipartisan support in Congress, but, as the president said, anything can be improved, and we are always willing to listen to ideas about how to make health care better and more affordable.”
Tax breaks for over-the-counter drugs date to 2003, as popular drugs like the allergy medicine Claritin began switching to over-the-counter status. The Internal Revenue Service loosened the rules on flexible-spending accounts so consumers could use them to buy thousands of nonprescription medications. The tax-free dollars can also go for insurance co-payments, eyeglasses and other out-of-pocket health costs.
Critics say the accounts encourage overconsumption of medical services. Since consumers typically must forfeit unused funds by year’s end, they often ended up scrambling in December to drain their funds by loading up on aspirin, antacid and the like.
“The entire flexible-spending account thing is a waste of our taxpayer dollars,” says Jonathan Gruber, an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a former paid consultant on the health law to the Department of Health and Human Services. “If you’re going to scale it back, this is a natural place to start.” (Another part of the law limits the amount consumers can save in flexible-spending accounts to $2,500 a year, starting in 2013.)
Peeling back tax breaks for health plans was on the table in 2009 when lawmakers began drafting the health overhaul. Inside the Senate Finance Committee, aides to three Democratic and three Republican senators hashed out the blueprint for what ultimately became the final bill.
Some big ideas—like limiting the tax break for employer-sponsored health insurance—lacked support, so committee aides lowered their sights. Making people pay the full price for over-the-counter medicines seemed like a way to reduce wasteful spending and generate money for the law’s main goal: expanding health insurance to nearly every American.
An objection came from William Pewen, senior health-policy adviser to Maine Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe.
He believed the tax-free treatment could lower health costs and thought everyone should have access to a flexible-spending account. He told the group that he takes over-the-counter Prilosec, a heartburn medication, which meant he didn’t need a more expensive prescription drug.
“I didn’t want to see us set up perverse incentives for people to use more costly drugs than they needed,” Mr. Pewen says.
He proposed a compromise that he concedes “was not the ideal solution.” People could spend tax-free dollars on over-the-counter drugs, but only if they got a doctor’s prescription. It wasn’t exactly a new idea: Medicaid, the federal-state program for the poor, already covers some over-the-counter drugs if they are prescribed.
Congress’s number-crunchers estimated the change would generate $5 billion over a decade. Hardly anyone noticed it, even as it stayed in the bill through passage in March 2010.
Only after the president’s signature was dry did the American Medical Association realize what had happened and send a letter to the government warning of unintended consequences, including more office visits and extra paperwork.
Sure enough, when the change took effect Jan. 1, patients began bringing lists of over-the-counter drugs to office visits and also requesting over-the-counter prescriptions by phone, doctors says.
While it may not be worth the trouble for some patients, the savings can add up for those with chronic conditions, especially if the doctor writes multiple refills. A survey late last year by Nielsen found that nearly half of consumers with flexible-spending accounts would request the prescriptions as a result of the changes.
Among those most upset by the changes are pediatricians, who say that small sizes of children’s medicines and multiple children per family make the requests particularly burdensome.
“It’s an amazingly disruptive policy,” says Jesse Hackell, a Pomona, N.Y., pediatrician who is charging $5 to fill such requests via phone. “I am now doing the IRS’s work, and that’s what I resent most.”
After writing two over-the-counter prescriptions free of charge in January, pediatrician Richard Schwartz of Vienna, Va., says he began imposing a $10 surcharge for each prescription, on top of the office co-payment. That is likely to discourage some patients from asking for a prescription, as the surcharge could outweigh the tax savings from using a flexible-spending account.
Doctors are also concerned about malpractice lawsuits, since a prescription potentially puts them on the hook for any problems a patient suffers from over-the-counter drugs.
Some malpractice insurers are urging doctors not to write any prescription without seeing the patient in person, says Lawrence Smarr, president of the Physician Insurers Association of America, which represents malpractice insurance providers.
Retailers and pharmacies, meanwhile, say another aspect of the change caught them flat-footed. Many flexible-spending accounts come with a debit card, making it easy for consumers to draw down the money in the accounts when they shop at a pharmacy. But under the original IRS guidance, people couldn’t use those cards for the prescribed over-the-counter medications.
An industry group representing Wal-Mart, CVS Caremark Corp., Visa Inc. and other large corporations warned that could temporarily halt use of the debit cards for any pharmacy purchase. The IRS eventually decided the cards could be used—as long as the pharmacist labels and processes the over-the-counter item exactly like a prescription.
That had another unintended effect. Thousands of over-the-counter products now must pass behind the pharmacist’s counter when the customer pays with the special debit card.
“At the moment it’s considered a prescription, it’s subject to all the regulatory requirements,” says Mike DeAngelis, a spokesman for CVS. “It runs through our quality assurance process. We have to generate a label.” The chain also puts each of the prescribed drugs in an individual paper bag.
Despite the hopes of Mr. Pewen in the Senate, some consumers think they will be better off getting a prescription-only drug in place of an over-the-counter medication.
In the Nielsen survey, 37% of flexible-spending account users said they would ask their doctor about prescription drugs that could replace their over-the-counter medicines.
Dr. Chung, the pediatrician in Fairfax, Va., says she recently imposed a policy under which her office writes prescriptions only for chronic conditions, like allergies. That deflects pleas from parents wanting a quick Rx for their child’s cold, but she’s worried about pushback. “It makes us look like the bad guy,” she says.