Benefit Design

MVP Health Care has launched a new virtual care offering for its New York Medicaid members that allows them to connect with primary care and specialty care physicians through an app made by the digital health company Galileo. Kimberly Kilby, M.D., the insurer’s vice president and medical director of health and well-being, and Christopher Del Vecchio, president and CEO of MVP Health Care, tell AIS Health that they want the new partnership to improve health equity for the insurer’s Medicaid beneficiaries.

The new partnership with Galileo is part of a multiyear effort at MVP to address an unmet need for virtual care. “Over the last 18 months, nearly 40% of MVP’s Medicaid members have not seen a primary care physician (PCP), often due to competing demands on time and resources such as transportation and language barriers,” Del Vecchio tells AIS Health, a division of MMIT, via email.

More than a year after pandemic travel restrictions pushed back the FDA’s approval decision on Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corp.’s inclisiran, the agency finally approved it. The new first-in-class therapy targets so-called bad cholesterol and is set to compete with two other biologics that target the same protein.

On Dec. 22, the FDA approved Leqvio as an adjunct to diet and maximally tolerated statin therapy for the treatment of adults with clinical atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD) or heterozygous familial hypercholesterolemia (HeFH) who require additional lowering of low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-c).

In their public comments about a proposed rule that would bring back standardized plans to the Affordable Care Act exchanges, two health insurer trade groups make it clear that they believe such a move will “stifle innovation” in plan design. However, state-based marketplaces that already require plan standardization appear to have found a way to make that policy work for consumers and insurers alike, sources tell AIS Health.

“I’m not aware of anything to suggest that innovation — however one might define that — has been hampered to the detriment of consumers in the states where we see this policy in place,” says Justin Giovannelli, an associate research professor at Georgetown University’s Center on Health Insurance Reforms. Giovannelli co-authored a July 2021 piece for The Commonwealth Fund examining various states’ ACA plan standardization requirements.

Pandemic-driven macroeconomic uncertainty and rising prices remain the biggest challenges for employer-sponsored insurance plans, according to experts. The cost of health insurance premiums has made employer-backed health insurance unaffordable to the point of being useless for many families, while the pandemic has created a volatile environment for many employers, particularly small businesses.

During a Jan. 26 panel hosted by the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington, D.C. think tank, employer health insurance experts sounded off on the myriad difficulties facing plan sponsors and employee beneficiaries. Worries over cost and the pandemic took up most of the discussion.

More than a year after pandemic travel restrictions pushed back the FDA’s approval decision on Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corp.’s inclisiran, the agency finally approved it. The new first-in-class therapy targets so-called bad cholesterol and is set to compete with two other biologics that target the same protein.

On Dec. 22, the FDA approved Leqvio as an adjunct to diet and maximally tolerated statin therapy for the treatment of adults with clinical atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease or heterozygous familial hypercholesterolemia who require additional lowering of low-density lipoprotein cholesterol.

For our annual series of forward-looking articles, AIS Health recently featured the perspectives of multiple industry experts on what Medicare Advantage stakeholders will be focusing on in 2022. For a follow-up installment, we asked several health plan leaders to share how their respective organizations will be innovating this year to meet aging members’ needs, advance health equity and address social determinants of health (SDOH) amid the backdrop of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

“The pandemic emphasized how our most daunting challenge — reaching our members in a new remote, digital-first landscape — remains our most compelling opportunity. Delivering home-based care to our nearly 10 million Medicare members and equipping them with the resources they need to age in place are central to our 2022 agenda,” says Jamie Sharp, M.D., vice president and chief medical officer of Aetna Medicare, a CVS Health company.

For health insurers that operate in the Affordable Care Act exchanges, 2022 is shaping up to be a relatively stable, profitable year with few regulatory surprises, health policy experts tell AIS Health. Still, there will be some regulatory uncertainty that plans must grapple with as well as a newly proposed rule effective in 2023 that imposes tighter controls on benefits and network design than even the Obama administration attempted.

That regulation is the Notice of Benefit and Payment Parameters (NBPP) 2023 Proposed Rule, released by the Biden administration on Dec. 28. Perhaps the biggest change included in the annual omnibus exchange rule — the move to require standardized ACA marketplace plans — was already known to the industry but still promises to make a significant impact.

UnitedHealthcare — which last summer drew the ire of provider groups when it announced plans to roll out more restrictive coverage policies for emergency care — is now making it clear that it has no plans to implement such a change.

In a letter sent Dec. 30 to the American Hospital Association (AHA), the insurer sought to reassure the trade group that “consistent with our prior communication in June 2021, UnitedHealthcare is not implementing any new policy regarding coverage criteria for emergency level care on January 1, 2022.”

Despite significant medical advances in the U.S. on numerous fronts, obesity management seems stalled by many clinicians’ reliance on a regimen of “diet and exercise” alone to treat as well as prevent. Obesity medicine specialists cite the increasing availability of safe and effective anti-obesity medications on the market — with dozens more in the pipeline — to allow for a multipronged treatment approach, but they point out that physicians seldom prescribe such drugs, and insurers often balk at paying for them.

This is partly because individuals with obesity, an increasingly prevalent, serious and costly disease, continue to confront the societal bias that “lifestyle choices” are to blame, experts say. It is also because obesity is a complex disease to treat, not merely a matter of gauging body mass index (BMI), they explain, and unless treated effectively, it may become the pathway to a wide array of chronic conditions including heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes, asthma and some types of cancer, as well as disability and premature death.

The average annual premium for employer-sponsored health insurance increased 4% to $7,739 for single coverage and $22,221 for family coverage, respectively, this year, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation 2021 Employer Health Benefits Survey. In recent years, high-deductible plans with a savings option have been gaining popularity. About 22% of firms offered an HDHP/SO and 28% of covered workers were enrolled in such a plan in 2021, representing slight declines compared with previous years. Meanwhile, the COVID-19 pandemic has increased the use of telemedicine, as 95% of firms with 50 or more workers offered telemedicine coverage in their largest health plan, up from 85% last year. In addition, about 65% of firms with 50 or more workers made changes to enhance their telemedicine benefits after the beginning of the pandemic.