Health Care Reform: The Journey Continues

Transcript

Stacey Hannaford:  Thank you, Celia. Good afternoon, this is Stacey Hannaford from Aetna's Exchange Project Management Office. Thanks for joining us today. In 2014, we will experience tremendous change as many of the affordable care acts biggest provisions go into effect. To help you understand what's going on coming up on the horizon, we're pleased to bring you this webinar: “Health Care Reform - What's Next.”

During the next 50 minutes, Colleen Rackley-Cuda, Senior Program Director of Aetna's Health Care Reform PMO -- and Paul Wingle -- head of Aetna's Exchange PMO -- will provide an update on the Affordable Care Act and how to prepare for and be compliant with the 2014 ACA changes. Due to the high demand for today's webinar, we're unable to share the presentation during the call today, so instead, a copy of the presentation was e-mailed to you this morning around 10 a.m.

Please hold your questions until the end of the presentation. The operator will come on the line and open the phone lines for you. The Affordable Care Act impacts us all. We're excited to share our knowledge about what 2014 will bring and how the health insurance landscape is evolving. I'll now turn it over to Colleen and Paul.

Colleen Rackley-Cuda:  Thank you, Stacey and thank you everyone for your participation this afternoon. We'll begin on slide 2, looking at our values. And certainly as you think about health care reform looking through the lens of integrity and excellence is of utmost importance. But it's really the inspiration and caring that sustains our spirit to continue to make it a better health care system and empower folks to live a healthier life. We do believe that reform is needed and will be very important to our country.

As you move over to slide 3, we still have 49 million people in our country who do not have insurance coverage. In 2010 we spent about $2.6 trillion on health care, yet we're not the healthiest country on the planet. That's expected to go up to about $4.8 trillion by 2021. Additionally -- with the economy being top of mind -- we see about 25 percent of those who are offered insurance that choose not to select it, and there's also many people that are eligible for Medicaid today that just don't enroll for a variety of reasons.

And then, 58 percent of Americans report either delaying treatment or forgoing treatment because of the cost. So while reform will -- the Affordable Care Act will expand access through Medicaid and the exchanges that Paul will be talking about in more detail, it didn't go far enough to reduce the cost of care or improve the outcome.

Moving over to slide 4, Kaiser Family Foundation studies showing that the health care premiums are growing at a rate of three times the rate of inflation and of wages. So if you think about almost 60 percent of people putting care off and those conditions likely becoming more critical, it is because the rate of premium is continuing to rise. And as we head into 2014 and all of the changes that are about to occur, that's even going to be a higher jump.

Additionally -- on slide 5 -- we spend about $750 billion a year in our country on fraud, waste, and abuse. You can see from the chart on slide 5, that results in about 30 percent of our overall spending of – 30 percent of that $750 billion on unnecessary service, excessive administrative costs. None of these are impacted at all or addressed at all through the Affordable Care Act.