Health
Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced Wednesday that the Affordable Care Act provided approximately 54 million Americans with at least one new free preventive service in 2011 through their private health insurance plans.
Secretary Sebelius also announced that an estimated 32.5 million people with Medicare received at least one free preventive benefit in 2011, including the new Annual Wellness Visit, since the health reform law was enacted.
Together, this means an estimated 86 million Americans were helped by health reform’s prevention coverage improvements.
The new data were released in two new reports from HHS.
“Americans of all ages can now get the preventive services they need, like mammograms and the new Annual Wellness Visit, free of charge, as a result of the new health care law,” Secretary Sebelius said. “With more people taking advantage of these benefits, more lives can be saved, and costly, and often burdensome, diseases can be prevented or caught earlier.”
The Affordable Care Act requires many insurance plans to provide coverage without cost sharing to enrollees for a variety of preventive health services, such as colonoscopy screening for colon cancer, Pap smears and mammograms for women, well-child visits, and flu shots for all children and adults. The law also makes proven preventive services free for most people on Medicare.
The report on private health insurance coverage also examined the expansion of free preventive services in minority populations. The results showed that an estimated 6.1 million Latinos, 5.5 million Blacks, 2.7 million Asian Americans and 300,000 Native Americans with private insurance received expanded preventive benefits coverage in 2011as a result of the new health care law.
The report discussing Medicare preventive services found that more than 25.7 million Americans in traditional Medicare received free preventive services in 2011.
The report also looked at Medicare Advantage plans and found that 9.3 million Americans – 97 percent of those in individual Medicare Advantage plans – were enrolled in a plan that offered free preventive services.
Assuming that people in Medicare Advantage plans utilized preventive services at the same rate as those with traditional Medicare, an estimated 32.5 million people benefited from Medicare’s coverage of prevention with no cost sharing.
The full report on expanded preventive benefits in private health insurance is available at http://aspe.hhs.gov/health/reports/2012/PreventiveServices/ib.shtml.
The report on expanded preventive benefits in Medicare and other ways that the Affordable Care Act strengthens Medicare is available at http://www.cms.gov/newsroom/.
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Reps. Thompson, Rodgers call on payroll tax conferees to extend health benefits to rural communities
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Congressman Mike Thompson (CA-1) and Congresswoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers (WA-5) recently lead a bipartisan group of Representatives in sending a letter to the House and Senate group negotiating an extension of the payroll tax credit, calling on them to extend Medicare provisions that benefit rural communities.
The provisions help ensure quality health care in rural communities and support local jobs.
“High quality health care in rural America cannot fall victim to partisan games,” said Thompson. “Folks on both sides of the aisle agree – regardless of if you live in a big city, small town, or rural community, everyone deserves access to affordable, quality care. Congress has extended these benefits many times before and we must do it again so that rural families continue receiving the same level of health care services.”
Approximately one fourth of all Americans live in rural areas that rely on local community hospitals, clinics and independent practices for their health care.
Many of these facilities face challenges that these important provisions help them overcome such as remote geographic location, workforce scarcity, physician shortages and constrained financial resources.
Extending Medicare health benefits help rural facilities and health providers recruit and retain skilled practitioners, provide quality outpatient care and mental health services, and respond to emergency health events.
In addition to the health benefits provided by rural health care facilities, they also provide jobs to rural communities.
The average Critical Access Hospital directly employs more than 100 people and provides more than $4 million in direct salary, wages and benefits.
An independent physician in a rural area supports more than 20 jobs and provides $1 million in economic benefit to their communities.
“The Medicare “extender” provisions are vital to ensuring that rural hospitals, doctors and other health care professionals can provide needed emergency and primary care,” stressed Gail Nickerson, President California State Rural Health Association. “The expiration of Medicare extenders will inhibit the ability of hospitals and providers to recruit and retain professionals, negatively impact patient access, and will have a devastating impact on the economies of our rural communities, because health care is a major employer and business in most rural areas.”
Below is the full text of the letter to Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Champ and Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus.
Dear Chairman Camp and Chairman Baucus,
Rural Americans depend on local community hospitals, clinics and independent practices as vital access points to critical primary, emergency and mental health care. These facilities also provide a significant number of jobs in hard hit rural areas. In fact, a single community hospital can mean as much as 20 percent of total economic activity in small rural communities.
Health Care providers in rural America, though, face significant barriers– remote geographic location, small size, workforce scarcity, physician shortages, unpredictable case and payer mixes, and constrained financial resources. Because of these challenges, Congress has enacted a number of programs that help these facilities and other rural providers recruit and retain skilled practitioners, provide quality outpatient care and respond to emergency health events. These programs, which were extended in P.L. 111-309 and P.L. 112-78, have long received bipartisan support. Other hospital provisions, which expire at the end September, accomplish many of these same goals and their extension is similarly vital.
Across the country, these programs have helped sustain fragile health care delivery systems and ensure that these facilities remain open and that access for rural Americans remains as strong as possible. Because of the vital nature of these facilities and the fragile nature of the delivery system in rural areas, we urge you to extend these vital provisions as part of the conference agreement.
Sincerely,
Cathy McMorris Rodgers and Mike Thompson
David McKinley
Nick Rahall
Bill Owens
Jo Ann Emerson
Shelley Moore Capito
Ruben Hinojosa
Adam Kinzinger
Bobby Schilling
Alcee L. Hastings
Thomas Petri
Mike Ross
John Carter
Tom Latham
Bruce L. Braley
Chris Gibson
Ron Kind
Earl Blumenauer
Peter DeFazio
Maurice Hinchey
Donald Manzullo
Peter Welch
Ed Perlmutter
K. Michael Conaway
Robert J. Wittman
John Garamendi
Reid Ribble
Tammy Baldwin
Sean Duffy
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