Health Insurance Blog

The five largest New Jersey health insurance companies and five physician groups have launched a pilot program to reduce administrative costs by allowing hospitals and physicians to communicate directly with health plans and address administrative tasks through a web portal.

The pilot is sponsored by AHIP and the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association.  If the pilot proves successful and can be rolled out nationally, representatives from AHIP believe hundreds of billions of dollars can be saved annually.

The participating health plans include:Aetna, Amerihealth, Horizon BCBS, CIGNA, and United Healthcare.
AHIP undertook a similar pilot with Ohio health plans in October.  That pilot program is still underway.

The article “Suddenly Health Insurance Reform Is Not Affordable” by Armen Hareyan on emaxhealth.com discusses some concerns over how Congress plans on paying for the proposed health insurance reform.  Providing affordable health insurance to the public is going to require obtaining funds from somewhere…but where?

Already millions of Americans cannot afford the health insurance quotes they receive and the main goal of the reform is to make sure as many Americans have reasonable access to health care as possible.  The latest plan in the House on health insurance reform is to give a surtax on high income families. It would apply to individuals with an income of over $200,000 and couples over $250,000.  They approximate that this type of surtax will affect 2.4% of taxpayers.  It will raise about $375 billion in the next 10 years, which is projected to assist in the cost of health care substantially.  Connecticut, Washington DC, Massachusetts and New Jersey will feel the effects of the surtax the most according to the article.

Currently, our system is not working for over 46 million Americans and a change is needed.  Congress will continue to hash out how to solve the problem of health insurance over the next few months and it will be very interesting to see what they come up with.