January 7th, 2010
eHealth, Inc. parent company of eHealthInsurance, announced that Scott C. Sanborn has been appointed as chief marketing and revenue officer. Mr. Sanborn will oversee all major marketing and demand-generation functions, including traditional and online marketing activities, partner management, public relations, customer care center operations, business analytics and product marketing. Mr. Sanborn starts today and will be based in eHealth’s Mountain View, California headquarters. He will report directly to Gary Lauer, the company’s chief executive officer.
With the expansion of the senior executive team, Bruce Telkamp, executive vice president of business operations, will become executive vice president of business and corporate development. Mr. Telkamp, who has been with the company for eight years, will transition his responsibilities in marketing and customer care center operations to Mr. Sanborn. Mr. Telkamp will continue his oversight of the company’s business development, carrier relations and legal departments, as well as lead the company’s new corporate development function.
Prior to joining eHealth, Mr. Sanborn served as chief marketing officer of RedEnvelope, Inc., an e-commerce and catalog retailer of upscale gifts, from April 2007 to June 2008. Before joining RedEnvelope, Mr. Sanborn held several senior marketing positions at Home Shopping Network, a television and internet retailer of consumer products, from December 2002 to April 2007, including as senior vice president of marketing. Mr. Sanborn was instrumental in growing Home Shopping Network’s online business, led an award-winning creative team, and created a new brand position and identity for the company. In addition to his role as senior vice president of marketing, Mr. Sanborn also held vice president of marketing positions at Home Shopping Network and for its online business. Prior to Home Shopping Network, Mr. Sanborn worked in marketing and advertising agencies including i-traffic/Agency.com in San Francisco, and Ammirati Puris Lintas in Holland. Mr. Sanborn holds a B.A. degree in English from Tufts University.
“Awareness is a major business priority at eHealth and we have more opportunity now for visibility than we’ve ever had in the history of the company. Scott will play a critical role in driving new revenue opportunities, managing and expanding our customer base, and executing effective and creative marketing programs,” said Mr. Lauer. “Additionally, Bruce Telkamp will now be able to focus more of his time and attention to developing new business partnerships and strategic relationships for the company. Bruce’s business operations and legal experience makes him uniquely qualified for this important and strategic responsibility.”
“eHealth has a strong foundation of proven technology, seasoned leadership and an established member base and has the potential to reach out to new audiences and go deeper into existing customer segments. I’m excited about my new role and working with the eHealth team to build on this foundation with new market opportunities, satisfied customers and a more visible brand,” said Mr. Sanborn.
eHealth, Inc. is the parent company of eHealthInsurance, the nation’s leading online source of health insurance for individuals, families and small businesses. Through the company’s website, www.ehealthinsurance.com, consumers can get quotes from leading health insurance carriers, compare plans side by side, and apply for and purchase health insurance. eHealthInsurance offers thousands of health plans underwritten by more than 180 of the nation’s leading health insurance companies. eHealthInsurance is licensed to sell health insurance in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. eHealthInsurance and eHealth are registered trademarks of eHealthInsurance Services, Inc.
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November 23rd, 2009
Michigan’s Grand Valley Health Plan ranked fourth highest in the country for its commercial and Medicare insurance plans in new national rankings released today by the National Committee for Health Quality and U.S. News Media Group.
They compare the 50 highest scoring plans each for commercial, Medicare and Medicaid policies.
The scores are based on 135 measurements for prevention, treatment and member satisfaction.
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November 21st, 2009
The U.S. Senate voted on Saturday night to move an overhaul health care reform bill forward, removing the first procedural hurdle for the bill to be passed in the chamber.
Supported by all of the 60 Democratic and independent senators, the bill was voted to be in a full-scale debate in the Senate starting Nov. 30 after this year’s Thanksgiving holiday.
However, all Republican senators said no to the Democrats-backed bill except one who missed the voting.
Earlier reports said that the debate over the bill was expected to last as long as three weeks before the Senate can vote on the legislation.
So far, the Democratic party has gained commitment of all the 60 Democratic and independent senators to the passage of the bill without further changes.
According to the 2,074-page bill unveiled on Wednesday, the overhaul health care reform bill would expand health insurance coverage to 30 million more Americans.
Citing an analysis by the Congressional Budget Office, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Democrat, said that the bill was estimated to cost 849 billion US dollars over 10 years but it can reduce the federal deficit by 127 billion dollars in the first decade and more than 600 billion dollars in the following decade.
Reid told reporters that public option, one of the most controversial issues about the health care reform, is included in the Senate bill, but states reserve their right to opt out after the bill is put into practice.
The bill would also cease practices including denying coverage to individuals with pre-existing conditions, and raise Medicare payroll taxes for the wealthiest Americans to help pay for the social insurance program for the elderly.
The House of Representative approved its health care reform bill on Nov. 7 by a narrow margin of 220 to 215. But, in the Senate, the bill needs 60 out of 100 votes to be passed.
After the Senate approve its different version, two chambers would need to reach an unified bill sent to the president to sign into law.
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November 9th, 2009
House Republicans unveiled their health reform proposal Tuesday night.
Their alternative health care bill “would reward states for reducing the number of uninsured, limit damages in medical malpractice lawsuits and allow small businesses to band together and buy insurance exempt from most state regulation,” The New York Times reports. “In its opening section, the Republican bill, which has no chance of passing, promises to lower health care costs and expand insurance coverage ‘without raising taxes, cutting Medicare benefits for seniors, adding to the national deficit, intervening in the doctor-patient relationship or instituting a government takeover of health care.’”
Unlike the Democratic bill, the Republican version “would not require people to obtain insurance or require employers to offer it. … It would not expand Medicaid or offer federal subsidies to low- and middle-income people to help them buy insurance.” The proposal also “would not explicitly prohibit insurers from denying coverage to people because of pre-existing medical conditions, even though many Republicans have said they agree with Democrats that the federal government should outlaw such denials” (Pear and Herszenhorn, 11/3).
Kaiser Health News has a copy of the legislation (Pianin, 11/4).
Roll Call reports that “[p]eople with pre-existing medical conditions would pay up to 50 percent more than average for insurance coverage under” under the Republican plan. According to a draft of the plan released earlier on Tuesday, “states would face a massive, partially funded mandate to subsidize high-risk insurance pools to cover people denied coverage by insurance companies with ‘a stable funding source.’ Those rates would be capped at 50 percent higher than average premiums for standard-risk insurance in a given state” (Dennis, 11/3).
NPR says the Republicans hope to offer the bill “as an alternative when floor debate begins, possibly by the end of this week” (Rovner, 11/4).
CongressDaily: “House Majority Leader (Steny) Hoyer today criticized the Republican alternative, saying it would not expand insurance availability and provides ‘no guarantees for common-sense reforms Americans want, such as eliminating [denial for] pre-existing conditions.’ Hoyer said the Republican bill would allow health insurers to sell across state lines and ‘very possibly gut consumer protections and encourage a race to the bottom where insurance companies will go to the states that require the least amount of protection and therefore the cheapest policies.’ He said allowing individuals and small businesses to pool together to force insurers to bring costs down ‘will lead to cherry-picking and discrimination against certain Americans’” (Hunt and House, 11/3).
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November 9th, 2009
Senate health committee Chairman Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, asked four of the nations largest health insurers – Aetna, Humana, Wellpoint and UnitedHealth – to explain their pricing policies after small-business owners testified Tuesday that insurance premiums were crushing their businesses, the Des Moines Register reports. The requests for information covered factors used in setting premium rates as well as details about highly paid employees and officers of the companies. Harkin asked for responses to the requests, which are not enforceable subpoenas, by Nov. 17. A spokesman for insurers “called the move unfair and misguided” (Clayworth, 11/4).
A House lawmaker announced a similar investigation in August, the Associated Press reports. This investigation comes as a skirmish in the “all-out struggle over the health care overhaul” between President Obama and the insurers. Democrats recently “have pushed for stripping the insurers of their decades-old exemption from federal antitrust laws.” Before Harkin announced the inquiry, a small business owner from Pennsylvania complained that many companies were facing larger premium hikes than the average – 11 to 16 percent for next year. He “said he saw an initial quote for coverage that involved a 128 percent cost increase. He eventually found a policy that cost 43 percent more” (Murphy, 11/3).
“Health insurance companies should open their books and explain to the American people why they support a health insurance market for small businesses that is so dysfunctional, and so lacking in transparency,” Harkin said in a statement, Reuters reports. Separately, “On Monday, [Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va.,] said an analysis shows for-profit health insurers are using less of collected premium dollars to pay for actual health care services than had previously been made public” (Heavy, 11/3).
This information was reprinted from kaiserhealthnews.org with kind permission from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. You can view the entire Kaiser Daily Health Policy Report, search the archives and sign up for email delivery at kaiserhealthnews.org.
© Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. All rights reserved.
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November 8th, 2009
Nov 08, 2009 (La Crosse Tribune – McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) –
The putative reason we’re going through the health care reform debate of 2009 is that
15 percent of our citizens have no health care insurance.
That’s true, and the fact that 15 percent of our citizenry — and, maybe just as important, countless underinsured citizens, the number of which we have no good handle on — remain a single major health care crisis away from bankruptcy is sufficient reason to address the issue.
But that’s not the only reason to address this issue.
An equally and perhaps more pressing issue is the fact that the current system can’t be sustained in the long term.
Why?
Medicare.
We’re getting older (thank you, Baby Boomers), and our socialized medicine for older Americans, Medicare, doesn’t truly cover the cost of recipients’ care. Health care providers need to make up the difference somewhere.
So the rest of us — the insured and the self-paying — are picking up the difference.
Eventually, that fact alone will kill private health insurance as we know it if we don’t change the system: Private insurance will become too expensive for more and more individuals and businesses in coming years as more and more people rely on Medicare.
That’s the problem in a nutshell.
Now any intellectually honest anti-socialist critic of current iterations of health care reform would also advocate the killing of Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, as all are “socialist,” not to mention the fact that they’re fiscally untenable in the long term.
You don’t hear them doing that: It’s politically untenable.
And any intellectually honest health care administrator will tell you that, in our current system, the itemized bill you receive for your care has little to do with the actual costs of that care — and everything to do with making sure the provider gets at least some payment for the services it has provided.
It’s a shell game designed to keep our current Rube Goldberg system afloat.
America’s health care system is a by-product of a centrally-planned World War II-era economy: Wage freezes prompted employers to offer a new benefit — recently invented and then-cheap health insurance — to attract and retain workers. But health insurance is now neither new nor cheap, so the system, burdened by the unaccounted-for and under-reimbursed expenses of Medicare and Medicaid patients, is collapsing.
This weekend’s scrambling in the U.S. House of Representatives is emblematic: The system is a mess and we have to do something.
And Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s hinting last week that the health care reform debate could extend into 2010 is also instructive: The issue is complex and isn’t conducive to a quick and easy fix.
The signal issues are these: Does health care reform fix the problems with our current socialized medicine for seniors? Does it pay for health care outcomes rather than number of procedures, an issue especially important to our area health care providers, who have pioneered the integrated, outcome-based health care delivery systems touted by the president and other reform advocates? And does reform fix the gross regional disparities in compensation for care under Medicare?
Since all the legislation so far delays Medicare reform till after the legislation is passed — despite counting on Medicare savings to help pay for the bills — it’s likely that this iteration of the health care reform debate is only a prelude to what’s to come.
That the loud health care argument about socialism vs. the free market so misses the real debate is unfortunate: The current system is brutally unfair because of the geographic disparities of Medicare and its unwise incentives to those providers who provide quantity of care rather than quality care. The Upper Midwest is being punished for its efficiency, and the result is that we pay the difference. That’s the issue that reform naysayers seem to miss: We’re already paying far more because the formula favors the wrong types of care and the result is that our bill is higher.
Critics of bills before Congress aren’t short on ammunition. But unless they can come up with an intellectually honest alternative that accounts for the fact that Medicare, as it stands, is unsustainable, we’d better get used to the idea that how we pay for health care will remain a difficult question for years to come.
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