Posts Tagged ‘
health care ’
Monday, October 8th, 2012
A new large-scale study has found that access to free contraceptive pills is part of the explanation for well-documented drops in the rates of both teen pregnancy and abortions. The finding comes just before the Obama administration’s health care law takes effect, including provisions that will offer birth control coverage to women nationwide. The Associated Press has more:
When price wasn’t an issue, women flocked to the most effective contraceptives — the implanted options, which typically cost hundreds of dollars up-front to insert. These women experienced far fewer unintended pregnancies as a result, reported Dr. Jeffrey Peipert of Washington University in St. Louis in a study published Thursday.
The effect on teen pregnancy was striking: There were 6.3 births per 1,000 teenagers in the study. Compare that to a national rate of 34 births per 1,000 teens in 2010.
There also were substantially lower rates of abortion, when compared with women in the metro area and nationally: 4.4 to 7.5 abortions per 1,000 women in the study, compared with 13.4 to 17 abortions per 1,000 women overall in the St. Louis region, Peipert calculated. That’s lower than the national rate, too, which is almost 20 abortions per 1,000 women.
In fact, if the program were expanded, one abortion could be prevented for every 79 to 137 women given a free contraceptive choice, Peipert’s team reported in the journal Obstetrics & Gynecology.
Image: Birth control pills, via Shutterstock
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Wednesday, August 8th, 2012
The new health care law allows parents to insure their children under the parents’ plans until the kids are 26 years old, but the law does not guarantee that that health coverage would apply should the daughters of those parents become pregnant. From The Washington Post:
Group health plans with 15 or more workers are required to provide maternity benefits for employees and their spouses under the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978. But other dependents of employees aren’t covered by the law, so companies don’t have to provide maternity coverage for them.
Although hard numbers aren’t available on how many companies don’t provide dependent maternity benefits, “I would say it’s common,” says Dania Palanker, a senior health policy adviser at the National Women’s Law Center. And the number could grow with the recent expansion of coverage to children under age 26, she says.
Dan Priga, who heads the performance audit group for Mercer, a human resources consulting company, estimates that roughly 70 percent of companies that pay their employees’ healthcare claims directly choose not to provide dependent maternity benefits.
In 2008, an estimated 2.8 million women ages 15 through 25 got pregnant, 12 percent of all those in this age group, according to researchers at the National Center for Health Statistics. (That is the most recent year for which there are pregnancy estimates.)
The article also quotes the March of Dimes as saying that the average cost for uncomplicated maternity care (including prenatal care, a routine delivery and three months postpartum care) was $10,652 in 2007.
Image: Pregnant teens, via Shutterstock.
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Thursday, August 2nd, 2012
Starting Wednesday (August 1), American women will be entitled to free birth control pills, Pap smear tests, and mammograms as a provision of the new health care law takes effect. NBC News reports that women will also be entitled to free breastfeeding support, supplies for gestational diabetes, and screening for domestic violence:
It’s not clear how many women will take adavantage of the new policy, but the US Health and Human Services Department estimates that 47 million women, ages 15 to 64, have private health insurance plans that will be affected. The 2010 health reform law requires policies provided by private health insurance companies pay for a list of women’s health preventive services, starting August 1.
However, there may be a delay in services for many women. The law applies to new policies — women with existing coverage may have to wait for their policies to renew for the requirements to kick in, which could take months. Many health insurers already provide this coverage.
The new rules are based on guidelines from the independent, non-partisan Institute of Medicine, which said paying for these services will save money and lives down the road.
“We want healthy women to have healthy babies,” said Dr. Jennifer Howse, president of the March of Dimes Foundation, a charity that works to prevent birth defects. “Receiving regular medical care greatly increases the likelihood that important messages can be delivered to pregnant women around issues such as nutrition and tobacco cessation, and provides opportunities to detect potentially dangerous conditions like gestational diabetes or high blood pressure.”
There are a few exceptions. Purely religious employers don’t have to provide the services to employees if they object. Related groups, such as Catholic-affiliated universities, have objected so the Obama administration offered what it called an accommodation, forcing the insurance companies themselves to pay for the coverage. But the religious associations still object, as do Republicans in Congress. They have promised to repeal the whole law if they win enough seats in the November election.
Image: Birth control pills, via Shutterstock
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Wednesday, May 23rd, 2012
Out-of-pocket expenses for kids’ health care are rising, and health care spending is growing fastest among Americans under age 18, a new study by the Health Care Cost Institute has found. CNN.com reports:
The institute is an independent nonprofit research organization that partnered with four major insurance companies (Aetna, Kaiser, United and Humana) to analyze 3 billion insurance claims of people with group employer-sponsored health insurance.
The study said consumers’ out-of-pocket expenses rose 7% from 2009 to 2010, according to the institute. For insurers, costs only rose 2.6% during that time period.
Per person under 65, the average annual spending on health care was $4,255 — that’s a combination of what people and their insurance companies paid.
Between 2009 and 2010, it rose 4.5% for Americans under 18. The trend has been upwards for children since 2007, when the average annual expenditure for this group was $1,790, compared to $2,123.
Image: Money, via Shutterstock.
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Thursday, September 22nd, 2011
A new study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has found that the rotavirus vaccine, which protects infants and young children against bacteria that causes severe diarrhea, significantly reduces the cost of providing health care for kids.
The CDC says that before vaccines were introduced in 2006, rotavirus was responsible for about 400,000 visits to doctor’s offices, 200,000 emergency room visits, 55,000 to 70,000 hospitalizations, and 20 to 60 deaths each year in children under 5 years old. By the 2008-2009 rotavirus “season” (January to June), the study found that vaccinated children had 44 to 58 percent fewer diarrhea-related hospitalizations and 37 to 48 percent fewer emergency room visits for diarrhea than unvaccinated children.
The CDC estimates health care savings of $278 million, directly attributable to the success of the vaccine.
“This study provides more evidence that vaccinating against rotavirus substantially reduces suffering and health care costs for this common childhood illness,” said Dr. Mark Pallansch, director of CDC’s Division of Viral Diseases, in a statement. “As more children get vaccinated against rotavirus, we expect to see even greater reductions in disease among all age groups.”
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