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	<title>Health Plan Consumer</title>
	<link>http://healthplanconsumer.com</link>
	<description>Saving your money and your health in the new "consumer-directed" healthcare world</description>
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		<title>The more things change&#8230;</title>
		<description><![CDATA[The more they stay the same. I&#8217;ve been researching the state health insurance exchanges that are part of the health &#8220;reform&#8221; law, and am struck by how little they may end up doing, and how much furor they are causing. Republican state lawmakers in more than half the states are scaring their governors away from participating in setting up exchanges, on the theory that insurance exchanges are part of an unconstitutional health reform law. But let&#8217;s look at this from the typical consumer&#8217;s point of view. A majority of Americans get their health coverage from an employer or from Medicare or Medicaid. A large fraction buy health plans on their own from insurance companies and another big chunk go without. So the exchanges, in an ideal world, would make it easier for the people buying on their own or remaining uninsured to buy insurance from private insurance companies, and some with lower incomes would qualify for financial help to pay for the premiums. So what is so threatening about an expansion of the private marketplace? The problem, of course, is that the marketplace might actually come with some consumer-friendly rules that make insurers (and their friends in state legislatures) uncomfortable. [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://healthplanconsumer.com/the-more-things-change/</link>
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		<title>Insurance website</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Got questions about health insurance? I&#8217;ve started working with a longtime consumer health insurance website called healthinsurance.org. My most recent article is about a fleeting tax deduction for health insurance premiums of the self-employed. It&#8217;s good only for the 2010 tax year, so act fast. Check out the website for lots of other good basic information about health insurance.]]></description>
		<link>http://healthplanconsumer.com/insurance-website/</link>
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		<title>Reform and health plan consumers</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Sorry to be away for so long&#8230;I was busy with a job working on healthcare reform. It was really fun for awhile to watch it up close and have all the wonky issues I&#8217;ve been writing about for 16 years talked about on a national stage. But now it&#8217;s just painful to watch. So what does all this mean for health plan consumers? Not much. Even if Congress manages to approve some consumer-friendly insurance regulations and maybe even a new, improved marketplace for buying insurance (an exchange), Americans will still be dealing with the same old health plans, haggling over bills and struggling to keep control of it all. So I&#8217;m convinced this blog is still worthwhile, as is my original intent of helping consumers keep up with all the new ways insurers will try to confuse them. So I&#8217;m back.]]></description>
		<link>http://healthplanconsumer.com/reform-and-health-plan-consumers/</link>
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		<title>Taking responsibility</title>
		<description><![CDATA[by Jan Greene OK, I need to comment on what we&#8217;re starting to hear about the cost to our healthcare system of lifestyle choices &#8212; fast food, lack of exercise, etc. I&#8217;m seeing more commentaries alleging that Americans are just too lazy about their own health and need to &#8220;take responsibility for their own healthcare,&#8221; a phrase that really sets my teeth on edge. Here&#8217;s the part that&#8217;s usually missing from this analysis, whether it&#8217;s coming from the right or left: Maintaining a healthy lifestyle is an issue of economic class. Sure, more middle- and upper-class Americans are heading into their later years and developing chronic ailments such as hypertension and diabetes and many of those cases are likely preventable with some effort. But you know who most of these chronically ill people are? They&#8217;re the low-wage workers of America, the single moms who are eking out a living, working a tiring shift at a job not many people want to do, coming home to feed the kids whatever she has time to slap together, and spending what energy she has on the basics of getting through life. She doesn&#8217;t have the time, energy or money to pay Oprah&#8217;s life [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://healthplanconsumer.com/taking-responsibility/</link>
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		<title>Questions arise about &#8220;consumer-directed&#8221; trend</title>
		<description><![CDATA[I&#8217;ve been busy with other (paying) work and pondering how to make this blog useful. Haven&#8217;t figured that out yet&#8230;I think this niche may be a place to talk about the specifics of negotiating your bills down. I don&#8217;t see anyone talking about that much. But they are talking a lot about how healthcare bills are knocking the stuffing out of average people out there. I think that&#8217;s why healthcare reform is finally gaining momentum. Even businesspeople are recognizing how the offerings of the insurance industry are not really helping them and their employees pay for medical care in a realistic way. For instance, I just talked this week with a small business owner in Tennessee who takes pride in providing health insurance to his employees even when others in his industry do not. But keeping up with the double-digit premium increases has been a challenge. So a couple of years ago he switched to a high-deductible plan. Pretty soon he and his employees were finding themselves at the pharmacy and instead of paying a $30 copay, they had to pay the whole $150 price tag of a medication. They were blowing through their $2000 deductible quickly. More importantly, the [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://healthplanconsumer.com/questions-arise-about-consumer-directed-trend/</link>
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		<title>No Price Tags</title>
		<description><![CDATA[By Jan Greene Hospitals are like the fanciest, most exclusive restaurants &#8212; the ones where the menus carry no prices. If you have to ask what it costs, the punchline goes, you can&#8217;t afford it. The same goes for health care in America these days, sadly enough. If you&#8217;re on the hook to pay a big chunk of that MRI or knee surgery that&#8217;s not fully covered by your insurance, you&#8217;ll be looking for a price tag ahead of time to know whether you can afford it. In too many cases, the hospital or imaging center or surgical facility can&#8217;t tell you how much it costs. In an interview on a blog called WorldFocus, Princeton economist Uwe Reinhardt explains in his usual clear and direct style how this came to pass. Read the entire interview to find out more about how the U.S. and Canadian health care systems compare. Uwe Reinhardt: Well, I once did a dumb thing: I asked an insurance executive “What do you pay in New Jersey for a colonoscopy?” And he just laughed at me and said, “What a silly question. There is no price for a colonoscopy. We have a different price for every hospital. [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://healthplanconsumer.com/no-price-tags/</link>
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		<title>The wonderful world of individual insurance</title>
		<description><![CDATA[By Jan Greene Gee, I love having individual insurance. Just got a 17 percent rate increase in the mail for my high-deductible policy. Which means I&#8217;m likely paying $8500 this year to insure my young daughter and I, given that it&#8217;s likely I&#8217;ll end up spending the $2500 deductible, as I have the past two years. Each time it was the cost of one expensive medical test, a a fairly common biopsy in 2007 and a nuclear scan of my back in 2008. I&#8217;m not unhealthy, and neither is my kid. But our medical costs keep going up. Why isn&#8217;t the individual insurance market handled like one big group insurance plan that evens out the risk among millions of people? I imagine the companies would say that people in the individual market tend to be older and sicker than the average group insurance member. But I wonder about that because they deny insurance to anybody with even a moderate risk of anything chronic. It&#8217;s not news to say that our system is a mess. I feel sorry for all the people being laid off who get to join the individual market and its frustrations and uncertainties. Good luck to you [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://healthplanconsumer.com/the-wonderful-world-of-individual-insurance/</link>
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		<title>Online Help for You</title>
		<description><![CDATA[By Jan Greene Just came out of a session at Health 2.0 about websites that help consumers with their medical bills and health insurance. Here are the highlights: Change:healthcare is my current favorite among these types of sites. It addresses the same issue as this blog talks about: The yawning gap between what consumers are now expected to know about managing their healthcare dollars and their practical ability to do so. It has detailed information about medical bills and is regularly adding tips on how to handle specific difficult situations, such as negotiating with a provider before you get a medical service. Another one, bwell-informed, is useful for choosing the right health insurance plan for you. There are a number of websites that allow you to buy health insurance online, but this one has a nifty tool that will let you compare plans and predict your out-of-pocket costs given your typical use of healthcare services. Getinsured.com is another website that helps people buy health insurance. The interesting thing about this was the company CEO&#8217;s comments about the difficulty of many of his customers to afford health insurance. He thinks the marketplace will in the next year or two offer many [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://healthplanconsumer.com/online-help-for-you/</link>
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		<title>Blogging Live from Health 2.0</title>
		<description><![CDATA[By Jan Greene I&#39;m blogging live, because that&#39;s what bloggers do. Exciting, isn&#39;t it?I&#39;m sitting in a roomful of 1,000 people who are hearing about how innovations on the web are going to help people better understand their health, find providers, stay healthy and figure out their medical bills. This is a daunting task but it&#39;s nice that so many people are working on it. This conference had half as many people show up last year, and most of the folks here are entrepreneurs coming up with new ways to serve you, the consumer. They&#39;re spending a lot of time trying to figure out what you want and whether web-based services can help. One of the big questions is how to find a doctor or hospital or other healthcare provider that you would like and trust. There are some services doing this (ratemds.com, Zagat, HealthGrades, etc.) but not many have had enough people comment to produce a reliable sense of what a given provider is like. It&#39;s also a little worrisome how these sites could potentially be manipulated either by someone with an ax to grind about a given provider or even by the provider him or herself. Still, the [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://healthplanconsumer.com/blogging-live-from-health-20/</link>
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		<title>Outing My Back</title>
		<description><![CDATA[By Jan Greene This may be a foolish thing to do, but I&#39;m going to publicly discuss my lower back problems. This is dangerous because I buy my health insurance on the individual market, which means that anything that places me in a category of undesirable risk could make me uninsurable in the future. But what&#39;s happening to me is not uncommon and raises interesting questions for consumers. I&#39;ve been buying my own health insurance for the past five years or so. My premiums have doubled in that time; to some extent it&#39;s because of my age &#8212; I&#39;m 47, a time of life when medical expenses tend to creep up. But premiums for everyone have also been rising at the same time. Like an increasing number of Americans, I have a high-deductible health insurance plan. I pay $2,500 before the 70 percent coverage for most things kicks in. There are exceptions for many prescription drugs and a certain number of doctor appointments. But for both of the past two years I&#39;ve spent that deductible and more because of what seemed like relatively routine medical tests that turned out to be really expensive even after the insurance paid its part. [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://healthplanconsumer.com/outing-my-back/</link>
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