2014 Health Insurance Predictions

The health benefits community has been waiting for some force — a shift in employer preferences, a shift in insurer strategies, an upheaval in Washington or state capitals — to drop a hammer and smash everything to bits for decades.

People have been watching for the hammer ever since managed care organizations came along and smashed Indemnity Plan World.

Preferred provider organizations came along and loosened the grip of the health maintenance organizations, and health savings accounts came along and slowly revived the concept of imposing a meaningful deductible. But Managed Care World puttered along, never really changing in any dramatic way.

Cost increases slowed a bit, but costs kept rising. Newspapers in California kept running sad feature stories about casserole-baking widows with terminal tear jerking syndrome who had lost their individual health coverage because mean health insurance companies had discovered that the widows had forgotten to mention their acne on their initial coverage applications.

Finally, in 2010, after all of those front-page stories about photogenic widows who’d lost their coverage, Congress passed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) and said PPACA would drop the hammer — in 2014.

Now 2014 is just a few days away, and it’s still not clear whether the hammer is coming.

PPACA might come and smash Managed Care World as we know it to bits Jan. 1, or a few weeks or months later, or it might just blow away, or something else.

With all of that continued uncertainty about the Hammer of Managed Care World Doom in mind, here are my predictions for the health insurance community for 2014

See entire article here – http://www.lifehealthpro.com/2013/12/18/2014-health-insurance-outlook-7-predictions?utm_source=LHPro_YearAhead_122313&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=LifeHealthPro_Marketing_Campaign