Health Plan Weekly

States have been pursuing reforms that would limit hospitals’ ability to charge facility fees for routine medical services delivered in outpatient settings, which drove up enrollees’ premiums and out-of-pocket health care costs, according to a study by Georgetown University’s Center on Health Insurance Reforms.

Facility fees are charges from hospitals and other institutional health care providers that ostensibly cover their operational expenses for providing care. When hospitals acquire or affiliate with physician practices and other outpatient health care providers — a trend seen in the U.S. in recent years — ambulatory services provided at outpatient practices often generate a second bill for the facility fee on top of the professional fees the practitioners charge.

Despite reporting a strong balance sheet for the second quarter of 2024, Elevance Health, Inc. faced a selloff that seemed to be prompted by higher-than-expected utilization in the insurer’s Medicaid book of business. On July 17, the day that Elevance reported its results, its stock price dropped by $32.21 over the full day of trading, a 5.82% decrease, to settle at $520.93 — despite year-over-year increases in operating gain and operating margin, as well as better-than-expected medical loss ratio (MLR) performance. 

Elevance took in $43.2 billion in operating revenue in the quarter, down $200 million year over year. Its operating gain increased by $200 million year over year to $2.8 billion, and operating margin increased by 0.3% year over year to 6.4%. Elevance posted an MLR of 86.3%, below the Wall Street consensus of 86.4%. 

Although multiple Wall Street analysts deemed UnitedHealth Group’s second-quarter financial results “messy,” they also suggested that the company’s near-term stumbling blocks are largely eclipsed by the prospects of a more favorable 2025. 

The “messy” moniker — used by Bernstein Research’s Lance Wilkes, Raymond James’ John Ransom and Wells Fargo’s Stephen Baxter — largely refers to UnitedHealth’s adjusted medical loss ratio (MLR) of 84.5% in the quarter. During UnitedHealth’s July 16 earnings conference call, Chief Financial Officer John Rex said that figure included an impact of 40 basis points, or $290 million, related to the suspension of some care management activities after the Change Healthcare cyberattack that hit the claims-processing subsidiary earlier this year.  

Citing a Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC) estimate that the government pays about 22% more for Medicare Advantage enrollees than it would if they were enrolled in traditional Medicare, participants in a July 10 panel discussion all agreed that the way MA plans are paid needs to be fixed. However, those panelists — each with ties to MedPAC — had very different views about what those changes should look like, underscoring how difficult it will be to get stakeholders to agree on any reforms even as scrutiny of MA intensifies. 

“What’s the diagnosis — in other words, what problem are we trying to solve?” Francis Crosson, M.D., queried during the Virtual Fifth National Medicare Advantage Summit, which was livestreamed from July 9-12. “Is it that the current MA payment methodology is fatally flawed and must be replaced now? Or, MA costs the Treasury too much compared to traditional Medicare? Or, MA costs too much because of a broken risk adjustment process, which if fixed, would solve the cost problem?”