Medicaid

Twenty-eight million people, or 8.6% of Americans, were uninsured for all of 2020. In 2019, 8% of people were uninsured during the full year; in 2018, it was 8.5%.

During a press conference, Census officials said there was no statistically significant difference in the number of uninsured when comparing 2018 and 2020 data. (The Census Bureau has cautioned against comparing 2020 data to 2019 data because of a disruption in data collection and individual responses due to the covid-19 pandemic — which is why 2018 served as the primary comparison.)

“It’s remarkable that, during a pandemic with massive job losses, the share of Americans uninsured did not go up,” said Larry Levitt, executive vice president for health policy at KFF. “This is likely a testament to what is now a much more protective health insurance safety net.”

Still, the annual report shows a shift in where Americans get their insurance coverage. Private insurance coverage decreased by 0.8 percentage points from 2018. Public coverage rose by 0.4 percentage points from 2018. That shift was likely driven partly by older Americans becoming eligible for Medicare, at age 65, and showed a 0.5 percentage point increase from 2018 to 2020.

Coverage through employers also dropped significantly, said Joseph Antos, a senior fellow in health care policy at the American Enterprise Institute, and low-income people were hit especially hard as pandemic cutbacks led to job and health insurance losses. Employment-based coverage dropped by 0.7 percentage points compared with 2018.

The Census 2020 data did show a decline in the number of workers employed full time year-round, and an increase in the number of workers who worked less than full time, suggesting that many individuals shifted to part-time work.

This changing nature of work is “part of the overall story,” said Sharon Stern, assistant division chief of employment characteristics at the Census Bureau. For the group that didn’t work full time, the uninsured rate increased to 16.4% in 2020 from 14.6% in 2018. And that impact was concentrated at the bottom of the earnings index.

“Almost certainly, the people most prone to lose coverage because they lost their jobs were lower-paid workers to begin with,” Antos said.

Antos said the Census Bureau data, which showed there wasn’t a significant difference between 2018 and 2020 in the percentage of Americans covered by the Affordable Care Act, misses the larger role the ACA played in helping those who lost coverage get it through the program. Many of those who looked into ACA plans may have met income requirements for Medicaid and joined those rolls instead. Medicaid is a federal-state program for the poor and coverage is free or available at a very low cost. Even with a subsidy, many ACA enrollees may face premium or deductibles or both.

Joan Alker, executive director of the Center for Children and Families at Georgetown University, said one of the main points that jumped out for her was the sharp rise in children below the federal poverty level who were uninsured, rising from 7.8% in 2018 to 9.3% in 2020.

“The rich kids actually did a little bit better, and the poor kids did a whole lot worse,” said Alker.

Overall, the percentage of uninsured children ticked up only slightly and wasn’t considered statistically significant.

Further research is needed to determine the causes of rising uninsurance among the poorest children, Alker said.

Oddly, the Census report did not show an uptick in Medicaid enrollment, although other reports have shown a big increase.

Data from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, which comes from state insurance records, shows a 15.6% increase in the number of Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program enrollees from February 2020 to March 2021.

A recent report from KFF, which analyzed the CMS data, found enrollment in Medicaid and CHIP increased by 10.5 million from February 2020 to March 2021. Enrollment increased steadily each consecutive month, with increases attributed to people losing their jobs and thus becoming eligible for public coverage and the Families First Coronavirus Response Act, which passed in 2020 and ensured continuous Medicare coverage.

This disconnect may be a result of the nature of Census data, which is self-reported by individuals.

“That’s always subject to error, and probably especially so right now,” said Levitt. “It could also be a result of particularly high non-response rates among some groups.”

Census officials acknowledged during the Tuesday press conference that response rates to their surveys were lower than normal in 2020 and have only just started rebounding in 2021. Other data sources do seem to confirm that the uninsured rate has remained relatively constant over the past couple of years.

Another important takeaway from the data was illustrating the continuing gap in the number of uninsured people between states that chose to expand Medicaid under the ACA and states that didn’t. The Census data showed that in 2020, 38.1% of poor, non-elderly adults were uninsured in non-expansion states, compared with 16.7% in expansion states.

“That became a huge gap after the ACA, and it’s not surprising at all that it remains a huge gap,” said Gideon Lukens, director of research and data analysis for health policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “That highlights the need to close the coverage gap.”

The Census Bureau report also offered insights into national income and poverty rates:

• The official poverty rate in 2020 was 11.4%, up 1 percentage point from 2019, marking the first increase in poverty after five consecutive annual declines. In 2020, 37.2 million people lived in poverty, approximately 3.3 million more than in 2019.
• Medical expenses boosted the number of impoverished people by 5 million in 2020.
• The median household income in 2020 decreased 2.9% from 2019 to 2020. This is the first statistically significant decline in median household income since 2011.

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A colonoscopy might cost you or your insurer a few hundred dollars — or several thousand, depending on which hospital or insurer you use.

Long hidden, such price variations are supposed to be available in stark black and white under a Trump administration price transparency rule that took effect at the start of this year. It requires hospitals to post a range of actual prices — everything from the rates they offer cash-paying customers to costs negotiated with insurers.

Many have complied.

But some hospitals bury the data deep on their websites or have not included all the categories of prices required, according to industry analysts. A sizable minority of hospitals have not disclosed the information at all.

While imperfect and potentially of limited use right now to the average consumer, this trove is, nonetheless, eye-opening as an illustration of the huge differences in prices — nationally, regionally and within the same hospital. It’s challenging for consumers and employers to use, giving a boost to a cottage industry that analyzes the data, which in turn could be weaponized for use in negotiations among hospitals, employers and insurers. Ultimately, the unanswered question is whether price transparency will lead to overall lower prices.

In theory, releasing prices may prompt consumers to shop around, weighing cost and quality. Perhaps they could save a few hundred dollars by getting their surgery or imaging test across town instead of at the nearby clinic or hospital. But, typically, consumers don’t comparison-shop, preferring to choose convenience or the provider their doctor recommends. A recent Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker brief, for instance, found that 85% of adults said they had not researched online the price of a hospital treatment.

And hospitals say the transparency push alone won’t help consumers much, because each patient is different — and individual deductibles and insurance plans complicate matters.

Under the Trump-era rule, hospitals must post what they accept from all insurers for thousands of line items, including each drug, procedure or treatment they provide. In addition, hospitals must present this in a format easily readable by computers and include a consumer-friendly separate listing of 300 “shoppable” services, bundling the full price a hospital accepts for a given treatment, such as having a baby or getting a hip replacement.

The negotiated rates now being posted publicly often show an individual hospital accepting a wide range of prices for the same service, depending on the insurer, often based on how much negotiating power each has in a market.

In some cases, the cash-only price is less than what insurers pay. And prices may vary widely within the same city or region.

In Virginia, for example, the average price of a diagnostic colonoscopy is $2,763, but the range across the state is from $208 to $10,563, according to a database aggregated by San Diego-based Turquoise Health, one of the new firms looking to market the data to businesses while offering some information free of charge to patients. Another is Health Cost Labs, which will have pricing information for 2,300 hospitals in its database when it goes live this month.

Patients can try to find the price information themselves by searching hospital websites, but even locating the correct tab on a hospital’s website is tricky.

Here’s one tip: “You can Google the hospital name and the words ‘price transparency’ and see where that takes you,” said Caitlin Sheetz, director and head of analytics at the consulting firm ADVI Health in the Washington, D.C., area.

Typing in “MedStar Health hospital transparency,” for example, likely points to MedStar Washington Hospital Center’s “price transparency disclosure” page, with a link to its full list of prices, as well as its separate list of 300 shoppable services.

By clicking on the list of shoppable services, consumers can download an Excel file. Searching it for “colonoscopy” pulls up several variations of the procedure, along with prices for different insurers, such as Aetna and Cigna, but a “not available” designation for the cash-only price. The file explains that MedStar does not have a standard cash price but makes determinations case by case.

Performing the same Google search for the nearby Inova health system results in less useful information.

Inova’s website links to a long list of thousands of charges, which are not the discounts negotiated by insurers, and the list is not easily searchable. The website advises those who are not Inova patients or who would like to create their own estimate to log into the hospitals’ “My Chart” system, but a search on that for “colonoscopy” failed to produce any data.

Because of the difficulty of navigating these websites — or locating the negotiated prices once there — some consumers may turn to sites like Turquoise. Doing a similar search on that site shows the prices of a colonoscopy at MedStar by insurer, but the process is still complicated. First, a consumer must select the “health system” button from the website’s menu of options, click on “surgical procedures,” then click again on “digestive” to get to it.

There is no similar information for Inova because the hospital system has not yet made its data accessible in a computer-friendly format, said Chris Severn, CEO of Turquoise.

Inova spokesperson Tracy Connell said in a written statement that the health system will create personalized estimates for patients and is “currently working to post information on negotiated prices and discounts on services.”

For consumers who go the distance and can find price data from their hospitals, it may prove helpful in certain situations:

• Patients who are paying cash or who have unmet deductibles may want to compare prices among hospitals to see if driving farther could save them money.
• Uninsured patients could ask the hospital for the cash price or attempt to negotiate for the lowest amount the facility accepts from insurers.
• Insured patients who get a bill for out-of-network care may find the information helpful because it could empower them to negotiate a discount off the hospitals’ gross charges for that care.

While there’s no guarantee of success, “if you are uninsured or out of network, you could point to some of those prices and say, ‘That’s what I want,’” said Barak Richman, a contract law expert and professor of law at Duke University School of Law.

But the data may not help insured patients who notice their prices are higher than those negotiated by other insurers.

In those cases, legal experts said, the insured patients are unlikely to get a bill changed because they have a contract with that insurer, which has negotiated the price with their contracted hospitals.

“Legally, a contract is a contract,” said Mark Hall, a health law professor at Wake Forest University.

Richman agrees.

“You can’t say, ‘Well, you charged that person less,’” he noted, but neither can they say they’ll charge you more.

Getting the data, however, relies on the hospital having posted it.

As for compliance, “we’re seeing the range of the spectrum,” said Jeffrey Leibach, a partner at the consulting firm Guidehouse, which found earlier this year that about 60% of 1,000 hospitals surveyed had posted at least some data, but 30% had reported nothing at all.

Many in the hospital industry have long fought transparency efforts, even filing a lawsuit seeking to block the new rule. The suit was dismissed by a federal judge last year.

They argue the rule is unclear and overly burdensome. Additionally, hospitals haven’t wanted their prices exposed, knowing that competitors might then adjust theirs, or health plans could demand lower rates. Conversely, lower-cost hospitals might decide to raise prices to match competitors.

The rule stems from requirements in the Affordable Care Act. The Obama administration required hospitals to post their chargemaster rates, which are less useful because they are generally inflated, hospital-set amounts that are almost never what is actually paid.

Insurers and hospitals are also bracing for next year, when even more data is set to come online. Insurers will be required to post negotiated prices for medical care across a broader range of facilities, including clinics and doctors’ offices.

In May, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services sent letters to some of the hospitals that have not complied, giving them 90 days to do so or potentially face penalties, including a $300-a-day fine.

“A lot of members say until hospitals are fully compliant, our ability to use the data is limited,” said Shawn Gremminger, director of health policy at the Purchaser Business Group on Health, a coalition of large employers.

His group and others have called for increasing the penalty for noncomplying hospitals from $300 a day to $300 a bed per day, so “the fine would be bigger as the hospital gets bigger,” Gremminger said. “That’s the kind of thing they take seriously.”

Already, though, employers or insurers are eyeing the hospital data as leverage in negotiations, said Severn, Turquoise’s CEO. Conversely, some employers may use it to fire their insurers if the rates they’re paying are substantially more than those agreed to by other carriers.

“It will piss off anyone who is overpaying for health care, which happens for various reasons,” he said.

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Health care for the nation’s seniors looms large as the baby-boom generation ages into retirement. President Joe Biden tacitly acknowledged those needs in March with his proposal to spend $400 billion over the next eight years to improve access to in-home and community-based care.

The swelling population of seniors will far outpace growth in other age groups. That acceleration — and the slower growth in other age groups — could leave many older Americans with less family to rely on for help in their later years. Meanwhile, federal officials estimate that more than half of people turning 65 will need long-term care services at some point. That care is expensive and can be hard to find.

Spending for paid long-term care already runs about $409 billion a year. Yet that staggering number doesn’t begin to reflect the real cost. Experts estimate that 1 in 6 Americans provide billions of dollars’ worth of unpaid care to a relative or friend age 50 or older in their home.

As the country weighs Biden’s plan, here’s a quick look at how long-term care works currently and what might lie ahead.

A Variety of Services

More than 65,000 paid, regulated service providers cared for 8 million Americans in 2016, according to the most recent federal report. In addition, AARP estimates more than 50 million people provide unpaid care, generally to family members.

Booming Number of Seniors

As baby boomers age, 10,000 people a day pass their 65th birthday. The Census Bureau estimates that more than 94.6 million people will be 65 or older in 2060.

From January to June 2018, the percentage of older adults age 85 and over needing help with personal care was more than twice the percentage for adults ages 75-84 and five times the percentage for adults ages 65-74.

The Cost of Long-Term Care Services

From 2004 to 2020, the cost for facility and in-home care services has risen, on average, between 1.88% and 3.8% each year.

The median income for a household in which the head of the household is 65 or older was $47,357 in 2019.

Sources: Genworth; U.S. Census Bureau

The Physical – And Financial – Burden

The $61 Billion Price Tag

Medicaid pays for the majority of long-term care services, but Americans also pay $61 billion out-of-pocket.

This story was produced by KHN, which publishes California Healthline, an editorially independent service of the California Health Care Foundation.

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