C’s The Moment - A Concise and Compact Collection of Coverage Calls and Considerations

Seize the moment.

Horace, 65-8 B.C.

At the moment, this is how the spinning  health care constellations look to me.

1)       Political Consequences – Donald Trump will win GOP nomination, will collide with Hillary Clinton planet, may survive the collision , and may usher in market and consumer-based reform, based on boundaryless competition of insurers across state lines and pressure on drug firms by easing ability of consumers to purchase drugs across national boundaries.

2)     Hospital and Doctor Consolidation -   By cutting Medicare and Medicaid payments and by encouraging bundled billing for episodes of disease and treatment, CMS will escalate the pace of hospital-physicians consolidations.  By doing so, CMS will unwittingly increase costs through third party intermediation, physician referrals to their hospital masters, and costly hospital “facility fees.”
 

3)     Cascading Costs - As health care co-ops continue to fail, as health exchanges attract sicker and older patients, as insurers hemorrhage billion dollar losses,   insurers will withdraw from markets, and will inflate premiums by 10% to 45% and deductibles by similar magnitudes to make a profit and to satisfy investors.

4)      Concierge and Cash Solutions -   Although its impact is unknown and minimal at the moment,   do not disregard or overlook concierge and cash solutions, wherein  consumers pay directly for more personal, more  timely, and  less costly  encounters and less bureaucratic access to physicians.   

5)      The Anger Contagion -   As the contagion of anger spreads among the American people over the failure of government to act and voter turnout continues to astonish onlookers,   remember: we are a republic for the people, by the people, and of the people, and those people are mostly middle class centrists, not elites on the left and right.   We are witnessing a revolution based on dashed expectations and a shift from the outside in, the upside down and the downside up.