Healthcare Digest 4/26: Quiz Helps Consumers with Healthcare Reform

For something as important as our health, any leg up is helpful. Especially since wide swathes of healthcare are mostly out of our consumer control: things like pricing and policy.

Over at U.S. News‘ Money blog, Philip Moeller offers some suggestions on how one can do one’s homework about healthcare reform. “Whatever the cause, the reality is that the health care reform law is extraordinarily complex. And consumers simply do not have the understanding or the tools to comply with the requirements that they obtain health insurance for 2014 or face financial penalties.”

Moeller is mostly enthralled with Kaiser Family Foundation — an org often mentioned as getting healthcare reform right: Kaiser also has a 10-question Health Reform Quiz. Your answers will provide a quick guide to what you know and, more likely, don’t know about the law.”

He contrasts that with the government’s own explanatory tool: “I wish I could say similar nice things about HealthCare.gov, the federal government site explaining provisions of the law. But it suffers from a government-speak malady. And perhaps because opponents have been pounding away at the law for years, the communications wizards inside the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) have become uber-sensitive about attacks on the law. Their public communications are framed by all the good things the law has or will do.”

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Friday’s headlines:

“I Regret That I Have But One Life to Give for My Country”: “I do not subscribe to the notion that we did not win the election because of the healthcare bill,” Pelosi said Thursday during a press briefing in the Capitol. “If we did, for tens of millions of Americans to have healthcare was well worth any of our political careers, in my view.” [The Hill]

Is the Libertarian Party In Danger of Becoming Relevant?: No. [The Huffington Post]

Charity Now. Policy Later: “Charitable donations have been rolling in fast for Boston victims – but wouldn’t better healthcare policies help them more?” [Guardian UK]

Green Healthcare: Is it Good or Bad for Plastics? Really, Plastics? You have to ask that? [Plastics Today]

Staggering Uninsured Numbers: “Eighty-four million people―nearly half of all working-age U.S. adults―went without health insurance for a time last year or had out-of-pocket costs that were so high relative to their income they were considered underinsured, according to the Commonwealth Fund 2012 Biennial Health Insurance Survey.” [Medical Express]