Health Insurance Coverage Quotes

Textbook Buffett: If shares are plummeting, it might be a good time to buy more.

That, perhaps, explains Berkshire Hathaway’s additions to its holdings of UnitedHealth and Wellpoint during the first quarter of this year, as both companies’ stocks fell sharply.

Berkshire Hathaway bought 300,000 shares of WellPoint and 400,000 shares of UnitedHealth, according to this SEC filing from yesterday.

“If a stock goes down 50 percent it doesn’t bother me in the least,” Buffett said earlier this month, Bloomberg notes “If we’re going to be buying things, we want to buy them on sale.”

Of course, if it was simply a matter of increasing holdings that are falling, we’d all be billionaires. There must be more to it than that. Case in point: Berkshire’s holdings in GlaxoSmithKline didn’t change during the first quarter, despite the fact that the stock price fell sharply. Back to the drawing board.

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Barack Obama has already argued a lot with Hillary Clinton about their respective health-care plans. Now he’s shifting the debate to John McCain, with whom he has much broader policy differences.

Obama and rival Hillary Clinton are both pushing universal health-care plans that would expand government’s responsibility while also keeping a role for private insurance. McCain wants to shift health insurance tax breaks from employer-sponsored insurance to individuals and families, who could apply a tax credit to insurance they buy on an open, less-regulated market.

McCain’s also alluded to taking steps to make it easier for the sick to get coverage in that market. (See more here on how both sides are making compromises that make their plans more centrist.)

Campaigning in Oregon this past weekend, Obama said not so fast on the Republican’s plan. McCain, Obama said, “wants to give you the failed Bush health-care policies for another four years,” according to the Chicago Tribune. And what has Bush done on health care? Nothing, Obama said, “except offer a few tax breaks to some folks who don’t really need them.”

Obama added that McCain would “shred” employer-based health care and leave every American to “fend for yourself” in the free market, according to the Tribune.

A McCain spokesman responded that Obama and Clinton “want to insert government bureaucracy into your medicine cabinet, while John McCain is committed to keeping America’s top-quality doctors, and reforming the system so that health-care plans would be made available, accessible and affordable for families.”

Health Blog McCain Bonus: In an opinion piece in the Dallas Morning News, Jonathan Cohn questions whether the sick would be able to get coverage under McCain’s plan, even if provisions are enacted to try to make it easier. The problem remains that insurers “generally won’t offer coverage directly to people with ‘pre-existing conditions,’ since they represent such bad financial risks.”

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The curtain in front of Google Health finally came up today.

On a tour, Google explains that, yes, this is another “personal health record,” a way for patients to store and manage their medical information in one place. But Google seems to be trying to address one of the big problems with PHRs: maintaining them is a big pain.

“Of course you don’t want to type in your entire medical history yourself,” says Google, playing the soothing therapist. So the company has developed partnerships with a handful of health-care entities to lend a hand. For instance Walgreen said it would help patients access their pharmacy records through Google Health, and CVS Caremark said patients would be able to get to their prescription records as well as summaries from their visits to MinuteClinic. Lab-test company Quest Diagnostics is also participating, as are pharmacy-benefits giant Medco, the Cleveland Clinic and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, according to this list of partners. The group isn’t huge, but it’s a step.

The biggest hurdle of all may be that only 14% of medical practices keep records electronically, the WSJ noted earlier this year. The real moment for these services isn’t likely to come until larger numbers of docs finally shift to electronic records that can easily be transferred to personal health records.

WSJ’s Google reporter Jessica Vascellaro sent us a dispatch: “Google’s vice president of search products and user experience Marissa Mayer said the company is very conscious of the sensitivity of the information it is collecting and has taken a range of steps — including beefed up security of the servers where records are stored — to protect it. Consumers must also select which participating medical organizations can read and send updates to their profile and can tailor the permissions for different providers.”

Still, some worrywarts have pointed out that Google and Microsoft, which offers something called HealthVault, won’t be subject to the strictures of the federal health privacy law known as HIPAA.

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted unanimously Tuesday to approve a plan that would give adults access to medical services regardless of their immigration or employment status.

Financed by local government, mandatory contributions from employers and income-adjusted premiums, the universal care plan would cover the cost of everything from checkups, prescription drugs and X-rays to ambulance rides, blood tests and operations.

Unlike health insurance, however, it would not pay for any services participants seek outside San Francisco. Instead, residents would receive care at existing clinics and public hospitals and from doctors who already participate in an HMO for low- and middle-income clients.

With backing from both Mayor Gavin Newsom and all 11 supervisors, the so-called Health Access Plan proved to be a politically popular concept in liberal San Francisco despite unmitigated opposition from the business community.

“What feels very good is the full board and the mayor getting on board,” said Supervisor Tom Ammiano, who first championed the idea of making employers pay for some part of their workers’ medical costs. “That says the political will is there to make it happen.”

To offset the estimated annual price tag of $200 million, firms with 20 or more workers would be required to spend $1.06 for each hour worked by an employee, and those with more than 100 workers would have to pay $1.60 per hour up to a monthly maximum of $180 per worker. Companies that already offer health coverage would still have to pay if their insurance contributions did not meet the city’s funding levels.

The Board of Supervisors still needs to vote on the plan once more for it to become final. The ordinance adopted Tuesday calls for businesses with more than 50 employees to start participating starting next July, while it would take effect for enterprises with 20 or more workers in April 2008.

Michael O’Connor, a nightclub owner who serves on the San Francisco Small Business Commission, predicted that the “noble burden” of the mandate would keep businesses from locating in the city and make goods and services here more expensive as employers pass on the costs to customers.

O’Connor said many business owners were disappointed by Newsom’s backing of the plan since the mayor got his start in business as the owner of a wine shop and several restaurants.

“One would think that someone who has owned and opened restaurants would be pretty clear on what the profit margin is, and how hard it is to get them open. A $5,000 licensing fee is difficult. A new $60,000 (health care) fee is disabling,” he said.

Before the board vote, Newsom defended the proposal as a creative solution to the problem of securing decent health care for uninsured residents, noting that businesses would not be alone in defraying the costs. Of the $200 million, the city would provide $104 million and participants would contribute about $56 million.

“This is a moral debate as much as a political debate,” Newsom said.

The initiative adopted Tuesday developed as a compromise between Newsom and Ammiano, who last year introduced legislation that would have required businesses to create health savings accounts for uninsured workers. In a nod to concerns from business, the final plan requires employees to work at least 12 hours a week to be eligible and has an opt-out provision for workers who are insured through their spouses.

Because fees would be adjusted on a sliding scale, city officials did not expect to see a rush of residents canceling their existing health insurance to take part in the city program.

For a free health insurance quote in California, visit http://www.healthbenefitsdirect.com/