The Federal News Networks offers a comprehensive report on federal employee pay and benefit now that the partial shutdown is over. Here’s a snip about the FEHBP:
Agencies may give eligible employees more time to enroll or change their enrollment in the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program (FEHBP) due to a qualifying life event that occurred during the government shutdown, OPM said.
“In cases where the effective date would normally be the first day of the first pay period following the day the employing office receives the enrollment request and that follows a pay period during any part of which the employee is in pay status, agencies may assign the effective date as if the employee had submitted the enrollment request immediately following the event,” the memo reads.
Agencies can also use their belated enrollment authority to extend the time that an employee would otherwise have to request or change enrollment, OPM said.
Agencies should adjust federal employees’ retroactive pay to reflect typical deductions and government contributions toward FEHBP. Standard deductions and contributions would apply as if the government shutdown hadn’t occurred.
Kaiser Health News gives an account of the Congressional hearings on prescription drug prices that were held this morning. Drug Channels takes a contrarian view here.
A bipartisan group of Senators and Representatives has introduced a bill to allow federal employees who are in the National Guard or Military Reserve to enroll in the TRICARE program. Nearly 20 years ago Congress pulled a large contingent of FEHBP enrollees who held military retirements into TRICARE. That move caused some FEHBP premiums to increase and it has cost TRICARE a ton of money according to the Congressional Research Service. The FEHBP is a good program. Leave well enough alone.
Becker’s Hospital Reports points us to the most recent Verizon data breach report which finds that over half of healthcare data breaches in 2018 were caused by insiders. Ouch.
In a bit of good news, AHRQ tells us that
New data released today by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) and Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) show reductions in hospital-acquired conditions such as adverse drug events and healthcare-associated infections helped prevent 20,500 hospital deaths and save $7.7 billion in health care costs from 2014 to 2017.
AHRQ’s preliminary analysis (PDF, 545 KB) estimates that hospital-acquired conditions were reduced by 910,000 from 2014 to 2017. The estimated rate of hospital-acquired conditions dropped 13 percent; from 99 per 1,000 acute care discharges to 86 per 1,000 during the same timeframe.
Finally, check out Forbes columnist Avik Roy’s interesting column on the importance of controlling hospital costs. “The new Democratic House has not talked a lot about tackling high hospital prices, preferring instead to train their fire on prescription drug prices: an important problem, but a smaller one relative to hospital prices.” Mr. Roy offers a solution but the FEHBlog is not sure the solution is feasible, to wit.
At my think tank, the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, I recently put out a detailed plan to tackle the problem of hospital consolidation. Its key feature is to eliminate the ability of local hospital monopolies to charge exploitative prices, by precluding them from charging the privately insured and uninsured more than they charge Medicare. (Hospital monopolies would remain free to charge less.)
I’m glad to report that a new bill, the Hospital Competition Act of 2019, introduced by Indiana Rep. Jim Banks[H.R. 506] , reflects many of these concepts. Members of Congress who want to do more than talk about the high cost of American health care would do well to take a look.