Some notes on healthcare, pt. 2
As the President cranks up the heat on the issue of healthcare, we’re going to be hearing/reading/seeing more and more discussion on the current and potential options for Americans to receive healthcare coverage.
Over the next few days, we’ll post a few basic things to keep in mind whilst the gears of our discourse pulverize the topic.
We went over the broadness of some of the terms with healthcare, but what about healthcare in Minnesota?
Minnesota has a bunch of health insurance plans that do vastly different things.
Health insurance plans pay healthcare providers for services to patients. Because there are a lot of different services and a lot of different healthcare providers and a lot of different patients, there are a wide variety of insurance plans.
For example, there are private health insurance plans that individuals can buy (you can price them at sites like MN Health Insurance Network or eHealthInsurance), and private group plans that employers can buy for employees (this is most likely what you have if you have medical and dental coverage, and why there are group #’s on your insurance cards).
Along with these different private plans of HealthPartners, UCare and Blue Cross Blue Shield, there are also public plans like Medicaid and Medicare that cover different groups of people. (Very broadly, Medicaid pays for folks who can’t normally get health insurance because they are poor or disabled, and Medicare is for retirees.)
But here’s where it gets a little crazy: in the state of Minnesota, Medicaid is actually Minnesota Healthcare Programs, which is run through the Minnesota Department of Human Services, and MHCP itself offers different plans to different people, some of which are actually serviced through private payers like HealthPartners, UCare and BCBS. So our state-wide public plans are serviced by private health insurance companies.
The public option for health insurance that President Obama is currently pitching fits smack dab in the middle of this complicated matrix of private and public health insurance plans.
