Yukki A Berchein
Image: Pharmaceuticals. Flickr/Waleed Alzuhair. Some rights reserved. Commerce has corrupted healthcare in the Irish semi-privatized insurance-based system. Late last year Senator John Crown revealed under parliamentary privilege in Ireland's Senead that his own hospital, St. Vincent's University Hospital in Dublin, had in 2002 billed the country's largest private health insurer €1 million [...]
Wonkbook’s Number of the Day: 70 percent. That's the latest estimate of the mortality rate in the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, the World Health Organization announced.
Wonkbook’s Chart of the Day: Oil prices are falling, and fast.
Wonkbook's Top 5 Stories: (1) Obamacare October surprises and a lower sales bar; (2) Ebola treatments for U.S. patients; (3) attorney general nomination update; (4) security threats of climate change; and (5) new help for long-term jobless.[Wonkbook: Why the Obama administration won’t oversell Obamacare in year two
Open enrollment for many 2015 health insurance plans is around the corner. Those searching for plans online may think they have found a great deal when they’ve found a scam. The FTC has reached settlements stopping two businesses perpetrating such schemes: Independent Association of Businesses and Health Service Providers Inc. Similar online schemes may still be operating. In addition, online phishing scams are eager to collect your personal information by pretending to offer health insurance.
Did you know there's a government program that gives more than $60 billion a year to felons and voracious, unscrupulous hospitals and doctors? There is: improper health-care payments. In FY 2012, Medicare fee-for-service, Medicare Advantage, and Medicaid produced $61.9 billion in improper spending. $30 billion of that is Medicare alone.
The data breaches of 2014 have yet to fade into memory, and we already have 2015 looming. Experian's 2015 Data Breach Industry Forecast gives us much to anticipate, and I've asked security experts to weigh in with their thoughts for the coming year as well.
Experian highlights a number of key factors that will drive or contribute to data breaches in 2015. A few of them aren't surprising: Organizations are focusing too much on external attacks when insiders are a significantly bigger threat, and attackers are likely to go after cloud-based services and data. A few new factors, however, merit your attention.
First, there is a looming deadline of October, 2015 for retailers to upgrade to point-of-sale systems capable of processing chip-and-PIN credit cards. As banks and credit card issuers adopt more secure chip-and-PIN cards, and more consumers have them in hand, it will be significantly more difficult to clone cards or perpetrate credit card fraud.
More insurance consultations can be found at http://www.westhillinsuranceconsulting.com/blog/. Learn more about insurance for your family and your own welfare.
Foxbusiness.com | westhill consulting insurance - While credit card breaches at retailers are grabbing headlines, identity thieves are quietly homing in on an even more lucrative area: health insurance and medical records. More than 1.8 million people in the U.S. were victims of medical identity theft in 2013, according to a survey by the Ponemon [...]
What about all the other factors that might skew this sort of analysis? Olds used several quasi-experimental statistical methods in his research to control for such variables. The basic intuition behind his methods is that a family just above the CHIP cutoff isn’t all that different from a family just below it. Whether you make 199% of the poverty line or 201% doesn’t matter for much, except whether or not you’ll be able to enroll in the program. With that in mind, his methods zero in on this sub-group, in order to confirm that the policy actually caused the increase in firm creation.
The average health insurance rate increase next year will be about 6 percent in New York State. State regulators today set the rates for 2015 after reviewing proposals from insurers, which requested an average increase of about 13 percent. Westhill Healthcare Consulting While some reduction was expected, some insurers told the Albany Business Review severe [...]
When shopping for a plan, start with the basics of what you’re looking for and what you’re willing to pay for, says Michael McMillan,Executive Director of Market and Network Services at Cleveland Clinic. Then make your selection carefully so you get what you’re paying for, he adds.
To help you navigate enrollment — either on health insurance exchanges or elsewhere — McMillan offers the following helpful tips:
Tulsa – October marks the start of when many health insurance plans open enrollment. Medicare and Obamacare will also soon begin enrolling for next year’s coverage.
2NEWSProblem Solver Jamil Donith has a word of caution before you shop for health insurance online.
The U.S. health care system has changed significantly since the passage of the Affordable Care Act. The federal law introduced many changes to the insurance space and health care market and helped change the way that people shop for health insurance coverage. With the launch of insurance exchanges, new marketplaces were opened up to consumers, but these exchanges also represented a promising opportunity for scammers that are looking to exploit a person’s private information.
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission recently issued a warning about the growing prevalence of insurance scams, and there are some things that people can do to protect themselves and their information when shopping for insurance coverage.
Open enrollment for many 2015 health insurance plans is around the corner.
Those searching for plans online may think they have found a great deal when they’ve found a scam.
Recently, a bogus trade association encouraged people and small businesses to pay for membership in order to qualify for health insurance. Once members, they would pay their monthly health insurance “premium,” anywhere from $40 to $1,000, thinking they had purchased a comprehensive health insurance plan. Instead they were paying premium prices for a medical discount plan with very limited discounts for just a few doctors and hospitals.
The FTC has reached settlements stopping two businesses perpetrating such schemes: Independent Association of Businesses and Health Service Providers Inc.
There is: improper health-care payments. In FY 2012, Medicare fee-for-service, Medicare Advantage, and Medicaid produced $61.9 billion in improper spending. $30 billion of that is Medicare alone. It should anger us, obviously, but also worry us, because the federal government is expanding its reach into the health-care market as we speak.
When investigators suspected that Houston’s Riverside General Hospital had filed Medicare claims for patients who weren’t treated, they moved to block all payments to the facility. Then politics intervened.
Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, a Texas Democrat, contacted the federal official who oversees Medicare, Marilyn Tavenner, asking her to back down, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. In a June 2012 letter to Ms. Tavenner, Rep. Jackson Lee said blocking payments had put the hospital at financial risk and “jeopardized” patients needing Medicare.
Weeks later, Ms. Tavenner, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, instructed deputies to restore most payments to the hospital even as the agency was cooperating in a criminal investigation of the facility, according to former investigators and documents. “These changes are at the direction of the Administrator and have the highest priority,” a Medicare official wrote to investigators.
In the turn of the most technologically advanced era yet come more and more advanced fraudulent acts as well. The genius invention of cyber insurance have helped small, medium and large scale businesses in securing their data, shared information and hacked systems. These cyber insurance have already reached not only the leading nations in the world but developing cities and countries as well such as Singapore, Jakarta, Indonesia, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Beijing, China, Tokyo, Japan and many more. If you are one of those who have individual experience with spam, scams, hacks and other illegal computer malpractice, then we at Westhill Insurance Consulting would want to enumerate top ten reasons why cyber insurance is important:
More insurance consultations can be found at http://www.westhillinsuranceconsulting.com/blog/. Learn more about insurance for your family and your own welfare.
The clock on insurance deductibles reset on Jan. 1, and that means big medical bills are in store for some. Patients may be required to pay thousands of dollars before their health care coverage kicks in. Visit http://www.westhillinsuranceconsulting.com/blog/ for more details.
Divorce is one of the most devastating events in one couple’s life. While most divorcing couples focus on the delicate and often difficult issues of child custody and dividing assets, breaking up can be hard to do in terms of your insurance policies, too. Whether the policies are in place for protection or as an investment, divorcing spouses need to review them in the context of their new financial circumstances. Westhill Insurance Consulting has listed some matters to be prioritized during this delicate time.
Insurance has been around since people have realized it should be. Yet sometimes, we cannot avoid not paying for our premiums especially when we encounter financial instability. These are called lapses. Westhill Insurance Consulting gives you the outlines of what you should review once you missed paying your premiums.
With the widespread of insurance nowadays, people are confused which one is legit and which one is a fraud; which can offer better and which one cost less. Choosing the right health coverage has never been easy, and the health reform law has made things more complicated.
Many of us have to rely on the company's health care insurance provider. Lucky for those people who can stay in one job for years. How about those people who jumps from one venture to the other? Westhill Insurance Consulting has faced queries on the best alternative whenever unemployment comes near.
There are a lot of health care insurance nowadays with thousands of healthcare insurance companies scattered around the world. Individuals and organizations are slowly starting to appreciate their importance in today’s practical yet expensive lifestyle and health demands. If you are a person living with cancer or a survivor or with any other critical ailment, it is important to make sure that the health insurance plan you choose covers the prescription drugs you mostly need.
Westhill Insurance Consulting gives out warnings on the spread of fraudulent insurance that are emerging targeting the need of cancer patients for insurance. Reports have already been shown in the developing city of Jakarta, Indonesia and Mumbai, India. Here are the tips that we must remember when we avail of critical health insurance for critical health ailment:
All new health insurance plans must provide a benefit package that includes prescription drugs, but the actual drugs that are covered will vary by plan. As you think about the kind of health insurance coverage you or a family member needs, look carefully at the kind of prescription drug coverage the plan offers to make sure the drugs you take will be covered. Because many cancer drugs can be extremely expensive, so making sure that your plan covers the specific drugs you take may save money.
Things You Need to Consider
o Medications You Take: The first step is to make a list of all of the prescription medications you currently are taking, including pain medication and anti-nausea drugs. You will need this information to be able to compare the coverage offered by different insurance plans.
o Drug Formularies: Most insurance plans have a formulary – a list of the drugs the plan covers. Check the formulary of each insurance plan you are considering to make sure that it includes the medications you are taking. You can find out your plan’s formulary by checking their web site or calling the plan directly. Agents can also help you determine which health plan to choose.
o Cost Sharing: You will want to carefully compare the cost sharing different plans charge you when you fill a prescription drug. Some plans charge co-pay, which is a flat rate the patient pays per prescription. Other plans charge a coinsurance, a percent of the total cost of the drug owed by the patient. For cancer drugs, coinsurance will almost always be more expensive than co-pay.
