health care utilization

Medicare Advantage plan design — particularly the cost of premiums — has a major influence on who chooses to enroll. The variance in that enrollment mix can have a big impact on outcomes and utilization, according to a new white paper from Inovalon and Harvard Medical School. Using Inovalon’s Medical Outcomes Research for Effectiveness and Economics Registry dataset, which tracks demographic and outcomes information for about 30% of the MA population at any given time, researchers found that socioeconomically disadvantaged populations were more attracted to MA, especially zero-premium products.

“Our research challenges the misconception that Medicare Advantage is a monolith, revealing significant differences in plan designs and features and how those variables affect enrollment and outcomes,” Boris Vabson, Ph.D., a health economist at Harvard Medical School and co-lead researcher on the project, said in an April 8 statement released alongside the research.

Since last summer, major health insurers’ reports of unusually high outpatient care utilization have proven to be a thorn in the industry’s side — inflating medical loss ratios and forcing Humana Inc. to significantly downgrade its 2024 earnings outlook. And according to some Wall Street analysts, the trend isn’t likely to go anywhere soon.

With the COVID-19 pandemic winding down, “grandma has been locked in her house for the last three years; she’s ready to go on a cruise and she wants that new hip, she needs that new knee,” Deutsche Bank Managing Director George Hill said during the annual Wall Street Goes to Washington Roundtable on April 8, hosted by the Brookings Institution. That increased demand, he said, “has resulted in a surge in outpatient orthopedic procedures that we’ve seen, particularly among seniors, particularly impacting the Medicare Advantage books of business.”

Recent reports from Wall Street analysts are shining a spotlight on challenges faced by UnitedHealth Group and Humana Inc., which are major players in the Medicare Advantage market. In particular, the authors cited increased utilization and potential lower reimbursement as reasons for pessimism, and they said they would be closely watching what insurers say during their upcoming first-quarter earnings calls.

Analysts’ concerns echo the sentiments that UnitedHealth and Humana executives expressed during their fourth-quarter earnings calls in January. However, it remains to be seen whether these are short-term trends or will continue for a longer period of time.

In newly released guidance, CMS told Medicare Part D plans that they’re allowed to cover weight-loss drugs if they’ve been approved for another medical use — a description fitting Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy (semaglutide) after it recently received an FDA nod for preventing major heart problems.

So far, CVS Health Corp., Elevance Health, Inc. and Kaiser Permanente have said their Part D plans will cover Wegovy for its newest approved use: reducing the risk of heart attacks and strokes in people who have cardiovascular disease and who meet body-weight criteria, the Wall Street Journal reported on March 28.

For other insurers that sell Part D plans, the decision about whether to cover Wegovy represents an additional challenge to grapple with, as they’re also facing significant regulatory changes.

The typical cost for a patient-provider email messaging claim was $39 in 2021, including both the portion paid by health plans and by patients. Although insurers covered the full cost for 82% of these claims, the patients who need to pay out of pocket typically spent $25 on a typical email message, according to Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker.

Use of electronic health communications has exploded since the COVID pandemic as more patients are seeking medical care remotely. CMS introduced several new billing codes in 2020 to help health care providers bill patients and insurers for a range of digital health services including electronic visits or asynchronous patient portal messages that require medical decision-making and at least five minutes of clinician time over a seven-day period.

Most seniors are happy with their health benefits, whether they get coverage via Medicare Advantage or traditional Medicare, but some pain points persist across programs. And when it comes to supplemental benefits that have attracted members to MA, a sizable portion of beneficiaries aren’t even using them. That’s according to new research from the Commonwealth Fund, which released results from its 2024 Value of Medicare Survey last month.

The nationally representative survey of 3,280 Medicare beneficiaries found that a whopping 96% of MA members said their coverage fully or somewhat met their expectations, vs. 93% of traditional Medicare enrollees. Medicare-Medicaid dual eligibles, meanwhile, were much more satisfied with MA than their counterparts in traditional Medicare. The most common reasons beneficiaries reported any dissatisfaction with their coverage were a lack of covered services, uncertainty about benefits and affordability issues. MA beneficiaries were slightly more likely to report frustrations with costs and coverage limitations.

Speaking at two health care investment conferences on March 5, executives at three major health insurance companies noted that they had been affected by the ongoing cyberattack on Change Healthcare, the nation’s leading processor of medical claims. However, they noted that it is still too early to assess how the Change attack will affect their first-quarter results.

The companies — CVS Health Corp., Elevance Health, Inc. and Humana Inc. — each reaffirmed their financial guidance for the year while addressing investors. They admitted, though, that they do not have as much information on claims and utilization as usual due to the Change outage that was discovered on Feb. 21.

Global spending on medications is expected to hit $2.3 trillion by 2028, as not only more therapies become available but also more people have access to them. That’s one of the findings of the IQVIA Institute for Human Data Science’s recent report titled The Global Use of Medicines 2024: Outlook to 2028. Oncology and obesity, among other therapeutic classes, are expected to be among the top areas in global spending over the next five years, estimated researchers.

With respective increases of 10.8% and 10.7% in 2023, health care spending on prescription drugs and home health care rose the fastest out of seven health care categories analyzed in a recent Altarum report.

Total national health care expenditures grew by 6.2% last year, while gross domestic product (GDP) increased by 6.3% year over year. In December 2023, health care spending accounted for 17.2% of GDP and has remained below 17.5% since January 2022. About 84% of health spending was attributed to personal health care, half of which was spent on hospital care and physician and clinical services.

As Medicare Advantage organizations grapple with rising medical costs — driven in part by increased spending on supplemental benefits such as dental, vision and over-the-counter coverage — CMS is tasking plans with the immediate submission of utilization data for “all items and services, including supplemental benefits” through the MA Encounter Data System (EDS). That requirement, which is retroactive to Jan. 1, presents a host of challenges as supplemental benefit vendors may not have the kind of detailed information CMS is seeking. And it raises broader questions about how the data will be used.

Supplemental benefits have been on the rise since plan year 2019, when CMS’s reinterpreted definition of “primarily health-related” enabled MAOs to include benefits like adult day health services, support for caregivers of enrollees and therapeutic massage in their plan benefit packages. In 2020, MAOs began offering Special Supplemental Benefits for the Chronically Ill (SSBCI), a category of “non-primarily health related” items and services that can be made available to certain beneficiaries. According to health care research and advisory services firm ATI Advisory, the number of plans offering expanded primarily health-related supplemental benefits and/or non-primarily health-related SSBCI grew from 628 plans in 2020 to 2,334 plans in 2024.