A bipartisan group of lawmakers planned to meet yesterday in Washington to re-examine U.S. farm spending for the next five years. Wisconsin Representatives Tom Petri, a Republican, and Ron Kind, a Democrat, planned to use a Capitol Hill rally to call for an “end to handouts,” Petri’s office said in a statement.
Under the insurance program, the U.S. taxpayer subsidizes the majority of premiums paid by farmers, covers much of the administrative costs tallied by insurers to run the program, and guarantees that all losses are covered, according to a series of articles published by Bloomberg News this week.
Crop insurance covered $117 billion worth of product in 2012, including almost all the corn, soybeans, cotton and wheat produced in the country. The U.S. Department of Agriculture spent about $14 billion last year on the program as the worst drought in a half century devastated plantings.
Supporters of crop insurance are stepping up their lobbying to preserve the program’s funding levels.
Richard Gibson, founder of American Agrisurance Inc. and a business consultant, told agents of NAU Country Insurance Co. in an e-mail this week to lobby their lawmakers. He said crop insurance had become a target as Congress faces a Sept. 30 deadline to pass a 2014 budget or a stopgap spending measure to keep the government operating.
“I’ve been around this business since it started, and the bottom line to it is, it’s been a political process since day one,” Gibson said in a phone interview yesterday.
‘Circle the Wagons’
Kind, the Wisconsin Democrat, said he isn’t surprised by the lobbying push. “It’s a very powerful, well-organized lobby out here to try to circle the wagons,” he said in a phone interview.
Petri and Kind co-sponsored legislation in May to cap the total value of crop insurance subsidies to $40,000 per individual annually, and eliminate support for those with adjusted gross incomes of more than $250,000. That measure, which the lawmakers said would save $11 billion over a decade, failed in the House.
“What we’re recommending is not unreasonable,” he said. “This is an area that we can reform” to find cost-savings in the farm legislation.
‘Fiscal Responsibility’
In e-mails to agents, Gibson criticized Bloomberg News stories that examined the program’s costs and vulnerability to fraud. Crop insurers and the USDA said subsidized insurance helps stabilize food prices and protects farmers from the vagaries of weather.
“The program is working, so why does Bloomberg put on the negative ad campaign to destroy it?” Gibson said. He told agents in a Sept. 9 e-mail “to stay engaged with our political representatives” and warned that detractors of the program “will be out in force when and if the farm bill ever reached the conference level.”
Adjustments to the farm bill are still possible as both houses of Congress reconcile separate measures in a conference to shape the final law.
New Hampshire Democratic Senator Jeanne Shaheen, who also proposed curtailing payments, said re-examining the program was a “smart way” to reduce the deficit.
“Limiting federal spending on crop insurance is a common- sense fix to some of the government’s most egregious spending and waste,” she said in a statement.
Petition Delivery
The U.S. Public Interest Research Group, which is organizing today’s event, plans to deliver tens of thousands of petitions urging members of Congress to overhaul the program.
“We’re using taxpayer money to pay big companies to buy insurance that they would buy themselves,” Dan Smith, tax and budget advocate for Washington-based U.S. PIRG, said in a phone interview.
President Barack Obama sought this year to cut almost $12 billion from the program in the next decade while Republican House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan has called subsidized insurance “crony capitalism” that needs to be reduced in an effort to curtail federal spending.
Tom Zacharias, president of National Crop Insurance Services, the main lobby for crop insurers, defended spending levels in a statement that said the Bloomberg series showed an “obvious bias” against the program.
Crop insurance “forces farmers to manage risk before, not after it happens, which saves taxpayers money,” Zacharias said.
Gibson said he wasn’t authorized to speak to the press on behalf of NAU Country, a unit of QBE Insurance Group Ltd. of Sydney, Australia and was expressing his own views.
The House legislation is H.R. 2642; Senate is S.954.
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Scurich Insurance Services has proudly served the Monterey Bay area since 1924. Scurich will take care of all of your insurance needs. Are you a business owner, did you get a new car or maybe you are looking to protect your family in the event of a tragedy? Give us a call, we can help!
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(Reuters) – Technical glitches still plague the display of new healthcare plans to be offered to millions of uninsured Americans starting in 26 days, including how medical charges and deductibles are listed, industry officials say.
Health insurers planning to sell policies to people who are currently uninsured, under President Barack Obama’s healthcare reform, say they expect the problems will be remedied by October 1, when consumers will be able to buy health insurance from state exchanges. On Wednesday, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), the lead Obamacare agency, said it was on schedule to sign final agreements with insurers between September 9 and September 11, allowing them to sell specific policies on the exchanges.
“Our timeline remains the same,” said CMS in a statement, “and we are working to ensure that any issues are resolved before open enrollment.”
Although the signing of agreements with insurers is a mere two days behind the original schedule, it led to speculation that there were serious technical snags. Late last week a conference call between the government’s information technology contractors and insurance industry representatives revealed some of those problems, which centered on how information about health plans, such as charges for medical claims and deductibles, was displayed on a “preview” website, according to people with knowledge of the call.
An official from Florida Blue, a large insurer, was concerned that a health policy it plans to sell on the state’s exchange would mislead customers: The preview website showed no charge at all for some medical services, rather than no charge after a deductible is met.
An Aetna staffer was frustrated that policies the company once intended to sell in Ohio, but withdrew, were still showing up in the preview site. Delta Dental of Wyoming reported that its plan was showing zero deductible in policies that cover parents plus children.
“That will be misleading if it pops up as a zero deductible and will put us on the hook if they go to the dentist” and expect not to pay a deductible, a Delta Dental staffer said on the call, according to a participant. “We’re concerned about that.”
The insurance exchanges, the heart of Obama’s Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, will allow residents of each state to seek subsidized health coverage. The government aims to sign up 7 million people in the first year. That number is expected to grow to 22 million in 2016, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
Carriers were sanguine the snafus would get addressed.
“We knew there would be IT issues going in,” said Kerry Hall, chief executive of Delta Dental of Wyoming, in an interview. “We made a business decision to be in the exchange for the people of Wyoming, and we’ve very optimistic that CMS will get this resolved.”
Aetna spokesman Matt Wiggin said his company was also confident the problems would be fixed.
IT experts said the problems should be familiar to anyone who has had to deal with an elaborate tech rollout at work, including the sometimes unsatisfying interaction with a dedicated “help desk.”
“It’s classic,” said Rick Howard of technology consultant Gartner, which is not an exchange contractor. “When you have these large IT projects, it comes down to not having enough time to prioritize issues based on severity. If you go live with this knowing you have glitches, consumers may make decisions based on false information.”
ONLINE ONSLAUGHT
For months it has been clear that IT would be both the backbone and the Achilles heel of the Obamacare exchanges. Although people will be able to buy health coverage by phone and through paper applications, most are expected to do so online. Almost everyone will seek information for policies at the website being created for their state’s exchange.
As a result, if any issue could delay the start of the six-month open-enrollment period next month, experts have said, tech glitches would be it. A report last month by the inspector general at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services warned that HHS was months behind the schedule it originally set in testing IT security.
The problems in displaying insurance information affect exchanges being built by the federal government in 34 states. Only some states were discussed on the IT conference call.
Another 16 states and the District of Columbia are responsible for their own exchanges. Among those, Oregon has said it would limit access to its exchange to residents working with an insurance broker or a state-trained “navigator” during the first few weeks of October to iron out any technical bugs. California is considering a similar approach.
Administration officials last week would not specify what IT or other issues caused HHS to push back the deadline for final approval of policies. But the IT call last Friday underlined the frustration of some carriers as they race to prepare for the launch.
Some insurance company representatives said they had asked repeatedly for errors to be corrected and still have numerous outstanding requests with the exchange help desk, according to people with knowledge of the discussion. Others said incorrect rates for certain services were on display.
After some two hours of such complaints, a federal IT representative on the call said: “I hear your frustration, and we’re doing all we can.”
Contact Scurich Insurance Services to see how we can help.
Scurich Insurance Services has proudly served the Monterey Bay area since 1924. Scurich will take care of all of your insurance needs. Are you a business owner, did you get a new car or maybe you are looking to protect your family in the event of a tragedy? Give us a call, we can help!
We are located at:
Scurich Insurance Services
320 East Lake Avenue, PO Box 1170
Watsonville, CA 95077-1170
Office: 1-831-722-3541
Toll Free: 1-800-320-3666
Information provided by: http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/09/05/us-usa-healthcare-technology-idUSBRE98405E20130905
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Tony Scurich, Principal/Broker [email protected]
Born in Watsonville Tony has been in the insurance business since 1981 and with Scurich Insurance since 1983. Tony is married with 3 children, graduated from Watsonville High in 1977 and Santa Clara University in 1981. Current activities include running at Rio Del Mar Beach & West Cliff Drive, biking, cooking/BBQing, reading biographies and eating breakfast burritos at Pixie Deli. Past and present community activities include board member of St Francis High School, Pajaro Valley Historical Association, YMCA (board member and youth basketball coach), Boy Scouts of America and, Pajaro Valley Chamber of Commerce (board chair in 2004).
Scurich Insurance Services has proudly served the Monterey Bay area since 1924. Scurich will take care of all of your insurance needs. Are you a business owner, did you get a new car or maybe you are looking to protect your family in the event of a tragedy? Give us a call, we can help!
We are located at:
Scurich Insurance Services
320 East Lake Avenue, PO Box 1170
Watsonville, CA 95077-1170
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Toll Free: 1-800-320-3666
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Average medical payments for California workers compensation claims increased sharply between 2005 and 2011, although medical cost containment has shifted some medical payment expenditures, the California Workers’ Compensation Institute said Monday.
Oakland, Calif.-based CWCI analyzed data from 1.9 million California workers comp claims between January 2002 and September 2012. Average medical payments for indemnity claims rose to $6,845 in 2011, up 60.2% from $4,273 in 2005, CWCI said.
Meanwhile, average medical payments for all California workers comp claims climbed to $2,543 in 2011, up 51.7% from $1,677 in 2005.
Average payments for indemnity claims that included pharmaceuticals and durable medical equipment between 2005 and 2011 rose 187.6% to $801, the report said. Average pharmaceutical and durable medical equipment payments for all California workers comp claims during that time increased 171.3% to $276.
The report showed that medical treatment represented 73% of medical payment costs in 2011, compared with 79.4% in 2005. However, medical cost containment expenses represented 13.9% of medical payment costs in 2011, compared with 11.6% in 2005.
CWCI said early analysis of 2012 claims showed that average medical payments for workers comp claims showed “marginal” declines in the first three and six months after an occupational injury.
Scurich Insurance Services has proudly served the Monterey Bay area since 1924. Scurich will take care of all of your insurance needs. Are you a business owner, did you get a new car or maybe you are looking to protect your family in the event of a tragedy? Give us a call, we can help!
We are located at:
Scurich Insurance Services
320 East Lake Avenue, PO Box 1170
Watsonville, CA 95077-1170
Office: 1-831-722-3541
Toll Free: 1-800-320-3666
Information provided by: http://www.businessinsurance.com/article/20130827/NEWS08/130829850?tags=|305|304|92
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