When shopping for health plans, the dollar amount of the deductible is usually easy to find in plan materials. But with family coverage it may be necessary to dig deeper to find out how much you’ll owe before insurance kicks in to cover your costs. Is there one deductible for the whole family or separate deductibles for each family member embedded within the family deductible? The answer could make a big difference in your out-of-pocket costs.

In a typical plan with a single $3,000 deductible, for example, a three-person family will generally have to collectively spend that amount out of pocket for medical services before the plan starts paying, with few exceptions. But some plans have both a total deductible and separate deductibles for each family member. In that case, the same $3,000 deductible family plan might have separate $1,000 deductibles for each family member.

A plan with an embedded deductible can be a good option if a family knows one of them will likely require more medical care than the others over the course of the year, says Sabrina Corlette, project director at Georgetown University’s Center on Health Insurance Reforms.

In the example above, if one family member covered by the embedded-deductible plan has a chronic condition and expects to rack up $2,000 in medical bills, insurance will start paying after the person spends $1,000 even if the family has not reached a total of $3,000 in out-of-pocket payments. But if a plan has a single $3,000 deductible, insurance generally wouldn’t pay until the family has spent the entire $3,000.

The Center on Health Insurance Reforms addressed this issue recently in a blog post, after receiving queries from state marketplace navigators to whom they provide help answering complicated consumer questions as part of a project with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

“Embedded deductibles aren’t for everybody, but for some families they can be very important,” says Corlette.

Under the health law, insurers have to provide consumers with a document that summarizes plan coverage details. But the deductible information doesn’t necessarily spell out whether a plan has one aggregate deductible or multiple embedded deductibles, says Corlette. Consumers may have to call the plan directly to find out.

Please contact Kaiser Health News to send comments or ideas for future topics for the Insuring Your Health column.

Kaiser Health News (KHN) is a national health policy news service. It is an editorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.

In its toughest crackdown yet on medical errors, the federal government is cutting payments to 721 hospitals for having high rates of infections and other patient injuries, records released Thursday show.

Medicare assessed these new penalties against some of the most renowned hospitals in the nation, including the Cleveland Clinic, Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and Geisinger Medical Center in Danville, Pa.

One out of every seven hospitals in the nation will have their Medicare payments lowered by 1 percent over the fiscal year that began Oct. 1 and continues through September 2015. The health law mandates the reductions for the quarter of hospitals that Medicare assessed as having the highest rates of “hospital-acquired conditions,” or HACs.  These conditions include infections from catheters, blood clots, bed sores and other complications that are considered avoidable.

The penalties are falling particularly hard on academic medical centers: Roughly half of them will be punished, according to a Kaiser Health News analysis.

Dr. Eric Schneider, a Boston health researcher who has interviewed patient safety experts for his studies, said research has demonstrated that medical errors can be reduced through a number of techniques. But “there’s a pretty strong sense among the experts we talked to that they are not widely implemented,” he said. Those methods include entering physician orders into computers rather than scrawling them on paper, better hand hygiene and checklists on procedures to follow during surgeries. “Too many clinicians fail to use those techniques consistently,” he said.

The penalties come as the hospital industry is showing some success in reducing avoidable errors. A recent federal report found the frequency of mistakes dropped by 17 percent between 2010 and 2013, an improvement U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell called “a big deal, but it’s only a start.” Even with the reduction, one in eight hospital admissions in 2013 included a patient injury, according to the report from the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, or AHRQ.

The new penalties are harsher than any prior government effort to reduce patient harm. Since 2008, Medicare has refused to pay hospitals for the cost of treating patients who suffer avoidable complications. Legally, Medicare can expel a hospital with high rates of errors from its program, but that punishment is almost never done, as it is a financial death sentence for most hospitals. Some states issue their own penalties — California, for instance, levies fines as high as $100,000 per incident on hospitals that are repeat offenders.

The government has also been giving money to some hospitals and quality groups to help improve patient safety efforts.

The HAC program has “put attention to the issue of complications and that attention wasn’t everywhere,” said Dr. John Bulger, Geisinger’s chief quality officer. However, he said hospitals such as his now must spend more time reviewing their Medicare billing records as the government uses those to evaluate patient safety. The penalty program, he said, “has the potential to take the time that could be spent on improvement and making sure the coding is accurate.”

Hospitals complain that the new penalties are arbitrary, since there may be almost no difference between hospitals that are penalized and those that narrowly escape falling into the worst quarter.

“Hospitals may be penalized on things they are getting safer on, and that sends a fairly mixed message,” said Nancy Foster, a quality expert at the American Hospital Association.

Hospital officials also point out those that do the best job identifying infections in patients may end up looking worse than others. “How hard you look for something influences your results,” said Dr. Darrell Campbell Jr., chief medical officer at the University of Michigan Health System. “We have a huge infection control group, one of the largest in the country. I tell them to go out and find it.” Campbell’s hospital had a high rate of urinary tract infections but was not penalized because it had fewer serious complications than most hospitals, records show.

The penalties come on top of other financial incentives Medicare has been placing on hospitals. This year, Medicare has already fined 2,610 hospitals for having too many patients return within a month of discharge. This is the third year those readmission penalties have been assessed. This is also the third year Medicare gave bonuses and penalties based on a variety of quality measures, including death rates and patient appraisals of their care. With the HAC penalties now in place, the worst-performing hospitals this year risk losing more than 5 percent of their regular Medicare reimbursements.

In determining the HAC penalties, Medicare judged hospitals on three measures: the frequency of central-line bloodstream infections caused by tubes used to pump fluids or medicine into veins, infections from tubes placed in bladders to remove urine, and rates of eight kinds of serious complications that occurred in hospitals, including collapsed lungs, surgical cuts, tears and reopened wounds and broken hips. Medicare tallied that and gave each hospital a score on a 10-point scale. Those in the top quarter — with a total score above 7 — were penalized.

About 1,400 hospitals are exempt from penalties because they provide specialized treatments such as psychiatry and rehabilitation or because they cater to a particular type of patient such as children and veterans. Small “critical access hospitals” that are mostly located in rural areas are also exempt, as are hospitals in Maryland, which have a special payment arrangement with the federal government.

The AHRQ study found that the biggest decreases in errors among those it studied occurred in the two categories of infections Medicare used in setting the penalties. Central-line associated bloodstream infections decreased by 49 percent and catheter-associated urinary tract infections dropped by 28 percent between 2010 and 2013. By contrast, pneumonia cases picked up by patients on ventilators that help them breathe – a condition not covered by the new penalties — decreased by only 3 percent during the same period.

Some of the errors on which the Medicare HAC penalties are based are rare compared to other mistakes the government tracks. For instance, AHRQ estimated that in 2013 there were 760,000 bad drug reactions to medicine that controls blood sugar in diabetics, but only 9,200 central-line infections. Infections from tubes inserted into urinary tracts are more common — AHRQ estimated there were 290,000 in 2013 — but those infections tend to be easier to treat and less likely to be lethal.

On the other measures, the study estimated there were 240,000 falls and more than 1 million bedsores.

In evaluating hospitals for the HAC penalties, the government adjusted infection rates by the type of hospital. When judging complications, it took into account the differing levels of sickness of each hospital’s patients, their ages and other factors that might make the patients more fragile. Still, academic medical centers have been complaining those adjustments are insufficient given the especially complicated cases they handle, such as organ transplants.

Medicare penalized 143 of 292 major teaching hospitals, the KHN analysis found. Penalized teaching hospitals included Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center and Keck Medicine of USC in Los Angeles; Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta; Northwestern Memorial Hospital and University of Illinois Hospital in Chicago; George Washington University Hospital and Washington Hospital Center in Washington, D.C.

“We know some of the procedures we do — heart transplants or resecting cancerous portions of the esophagus — are going to be just more prone to having some of these adverse events,” said Dr. Atul Grover, the chief public policy officer of the Association of American Medical Colleges. “To lump in all of those things that are very complex procedures with simple things like pneumonia or hip replacements may not be giving an accurate result.”

Medicare levied penalties against a third or more of the hospitals it assessed in Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, Rhode Island, Utah, Washington and the District of Columbia, the KHN analysis found.

The penalties are reassessed each year and Medicare plans to add in more kinds of injuries. Starting next October, Medicare will assess rates of surgical site infections to its analysis. The following year, Medicare will examine the frequency of two antibiotic-resistant germs: Clostridium difficile, known as C. diff, and methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, known as MRSA.

Kaiser Health News (KHN) is a national health policy news service. It is an editorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.

Even though more Americans have access to health insurance because of the health law, getting access to mental health services can still be challenging.

A new report concludes that despite the 2008 mental health parity law, some state exchange health plans may still have a way to go to even the playing field between mental and physical benefits. The report, released by the advocacy group Mental Health America, was paid for by Takeda Pharmaceuticals U.S.A. and Lundbeck U.S.A, a pharmaceutical company that specializes in neurology and psychiatric treatments.

The report listed the states with the lowest prevalence of mental illness and the highest rates of access to care as Massachusetts, Vermont, Maine, North Dakota and Delaware. Those with the highest prevalence of mental illness and most limited access are Arizona, Mississippi, Nevada, Washington and Louisiana.

Among its other findings:

– 42.5 million of adults in America, 18.19 percent, suffer from a mental health issue.

– 19.7 million, or 8.46 percent, have a substance abuse problem.

– 8.8 million, or 3.77 percent of Americans have reported serious thoughts of suicide.

– The highest rates of emotional, behavioral or developmental issues among young people occur just west of the Appalachian Mountains, where poverty and social inequality are pervasive.

Part of MHA’s examination focused on the exchange market and its essential health benefit requirements that guided 2014 coverage. The group found that, while information provided through plans’ “explanation of benefits” might show that there aren’t limits on mental health coverage, limitations including treatment caps and other barriers still exist.

“Parity is in its infancy. Most plans know the numerical requirements around cost-sharing, but few have taken seriously the requirements around equity — around access through networks and barriers to care through prior authorization,” said Mike Thompson, health care practice leader at PricewaterhouseCoopers. “And, in practice, we have a history of imposing much more stringent medical necessity standards on mental health care than other health care.”

However, Susan Pisano, vice president of communications for America’s Health Insurance Plans, an insurance trade group, said the report doesn’t reflect the fact that many health plans have rolling renewals. That means the plans have until Jan. 1, 2015, to fully comply with the parity law.

“Our members are committed to mental health parity, and we’re supportive of legislation, and what isn’t apparent is that benchmark plans represented a snapshot in time … so that doesn’t give us the full picture,” Pisano said. “Our plans have really been working to get in compliance.”

Chuck Ingoglia, senior vice president of public policy at the National Council for Behavioral Health, a Washington-based trade group for community mental health and substance use treatment organizations, said the report’s findings aren’t surprising — though they are troubling. Implementation of the parity law remains a work in progress, he said.

“The law is based on a sound policy premise — that addiction and mental health treatment decisions and management should be comparable to physical health conditions,” he said. “But this also creates a tremendous barrier to proving violations as it requires a consumer to obtain access to plan documents for both types of care, which is frequently handled by different plans,” Ingoglia said.

In addition, the report found that some plans didn’t set out what and how many services were covered. That means consumers would only find out a treatment wouldn’t be paid for by their insurer after they’d already received care.

Americans with mental disorders have the lowest rates of health insurance coverage, so obtaining  insurance is a good first step, according to Al Guida, a Washington, D.C.-based lobbyist who works on mental health issues with Guide Consulting Services. But the only way a denial can be reversed is through an appeal, which can be a long and arduous process.

“The vast majority of insurance plans offered on Affordable Care Act federal and state exchanges have close to no transparency, which could lead to abrupt changes in both mental health providers and psychotropic drug regimens with the potential for serious clinical consequences,” Guida said.

Meanwhile, there is a shortage of mental health care professionals — nationally there is only one provider for every 790 people, according to the report.

All of these factors can cause minor mental illnesses to grow more severe, according to Mental Health America CEO Paul Gionfriddo.

He suggested that mental illness should be screened for and covered in the same way cancer, kidney disease and other illnesses are.

“Right now we’re trapped in a stage where we wait for a crisis, when they’re in advanced stages and then we treat it, and we wonder why it’s so hard to treat it more cheaply,” Giofriddo said.

Kaiser Health News (KHN) is a national health policy news service. It is an editorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.

The Alaska Nurses Association will have limited hours durings the weeks of December 22nd and December 29th.

AaNA will be closed on December 25th, and open by appointment only on December 24th and December 26th.

AaNA will be closed on January 1st, and open by appointment only on December 31st.

If you need assistance during the holidays, please contact either Andrea Nutty at andrea@aknurse.org or Donna Phillips at donna@aknurse.org.

AaNA wishes you and your family a joyful holiday season and a Merry Christmas. Thank you to all of the nurses who will make sacrifices to put others first and work on these holidays.

Just days before the requirement for most large employers to provide health insurance takes effect, a new poll finds the public easily swayed over arguments for and against the policy.

Six in 10 respondents to the monthly tracking poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation (Kaiser Health News is an editorially independent program of the foundation) said they generally favor the requirement that firms with more than 100 workers pay a fine if they do not offer workers coverage.

But minimal follow-up information can have a major effect on their viewpoint, the poll found.

For example, when people who support the “employer mandate” were told that employers might respond to the requirement by moving workers from full-time to part time, support dropped from 60 percent to 27 percent. And when people who disapprove of the policy were told that most large employers will not be affected because they already provide insurance, support surged to 76 percent.

Opinion also remains malleable about the requirement for most people to have health insurance – the so-called “individual mandate.”

It remains among the least popular aspects of the law – with just a 35 percent approval rating. But when people are told that the mandate doesn’t affect most Americans because they already have coverage through an employer, support jumps to 62 percent. Conversely, when supporters are told that the requirement means some people might have to purchase insurance “they find too expensive or don’t want,” opposition grows from 64 percent to 79 percent.

The poll also found that a year into full implementation, most Americans, and most of those without insurance, remain unaware about many of the health law’s major features.

Nearly four in 10 people say the law allows immigrants in the country illegally to get financial help to purchase insurance (it does not), and more than 40 percent say (incorrectly) that the law creates a government panel to make decisions about end-of-life care for Medicare recipients.

At the same time, only about 3 percent were able to correctly say what the fine will be in 2015 for lacking insurance (the greater of $325 or 2 percent of household income).  Among those without insurance, only 5 percent knew that the deadline for 2015 sign-ups is Feb. 15.

The poll was conducted between Dec. 2 and 9 among a nationally representative sample of 1,505 adults age 18 and over. The margin of error is plus or minus three percentage points for the full sample.

Kaiser Health News (KHN) is a national health policy news service. It is an editorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.

Sandra Lopez and her Chihuahua, Coco, were inseparable. He followed her everywhere, and kept Lopez’s mood up when she was in pain – which was often.

On Oct. 15, Lopez, died at age 49 of pancreatic and vaginal cancer that had slowly spread throughout her body over two years. She left behind a 15-year-old daughter and little Coco. But with hospice care, she spent her last weeks where she wanted to be — at home, with her pain under control.

Sandra was in and out of the hospital in 2014, but for the months she was home, a hospice nurse from Metropolitan Jewish Health System visited once a week to help manage the pain, backed up by a 24-hour, nurse-staffed phone line that Lopez called often.

“Some days the pain is so excruciating,” she told me in August from the couch in her Brooklyn apartment, “that the pain overrides the medication.”

But despite evidence that hospices can greatly relieve discomfort, extend life and save money, and despite a generous hospice benefit available through both Medicare and Medicaid, relatively few people in New York take advantage of it, compared to elsewhere in the country.

The reasons for this local gap are complicated, but Jeanne Dennis, senior vice president of hospice and palliative care at the Visiting Nurse Service of New York, says one place to start is with patients’ fears. “If you’re referred to hospice, it means no one expects you to get better,” Dennis says. “And that is, in my mind, a threshold that’s difficult for people to step over.”

Experts also focus on what they call medical culture, which can vary dramatically from region to region. According to this theory, physicians in the metropolitan area are specialists and sub-specialists, and institutions put a premium on treatments and tests. Even more than other places, the goal is to cure patients and not just care for them. Treating and testing is just what they do — letting go isn’t, says Dennis.

“Physicians put off the conversation [about hospice]: ‘It’s a little too soon;’ ‘it’s a little too early;’ ‘I don’t have enough time today;’ ‘I’m not sure they’re ready for it,’” Dennis says.

New York has 7 out of the ten hospitals in the United States with the fewest hospice referrals. Local academic medical centers — national leaders in research — do better, but still lag behind the rest of the country in their referral rates. It’s a big contrast to some hospitals around the country — particularly several in Arizona, Utah and Florida, where more than 75 percent of dying patients take advantage of Medicare’s hospice benefit.

Further, most hospice referrals in New York are for brief stays — a week or less — 2.5 times shorter than the national average. Szoa Geng, a healthcare consultant from the firm Strategy&, says when hospitals move people to hospice with just a few days left to live, the patients don’t get the full hospice experience.

“They’re not getting the psychosocial support, and their families are not,” Geng says. “It can be a time of closure, and coming to peace with a lot of things in your life, and none of that can happen if you come onto hospice with a day left.”

Hospice care mostly takes place at home, but it can also occur in freestanding hospices, nursing homes or designated areas of hospitals. To receive the care, a doctor must predict a patient is in the last six months of life without hope of improving. There’s no penalty for outliving that prediction; some patients stabilize and go off hospice care, then return later when they start declining again.

About 25 percent of people in the New York metropolitan area use hospice care in their last six months of life, compared to close to 50 percent nationally. Statewide, the rate is closer to 30 percent. But that still makes New York 50th out of 51 states and the District of Columbia, according to the 2011 Dartmouth Health Atlas, the most recent statistics available.

Sandra Lopez said that before her oncologist told her about hospice care, she frequently called 911 to request an ambulance to take her to the hospital, where she would be admitted and spend days at a time. That happened “dozens and dozens of times,” in a year, Lopez said.

At around $210 a day, Lopez’s hospice care cost Medicaid tens of thousands of dollars — probably less than her revolving-door trips to the hospital (with their multi-night stays), but still a lot of money.

For Lopez, hospice helped her get ready to walk down the final road.

“I stopped worrying — like the worry box I used to be,” she told me in August. “I just live my life normally, like everybody else, because worrying will just probably get me more sick.”

Lopez knew that at some point her body would start shutting down, but she would never say how much time her doctors estimated she had remaining, because she didn’t dwell on that, she said. Facing death, she was at peace and knew she could stay that way — as long as someone was with her at home, at her bedside, helping subdue her pain.

This story is part of a reporting partnership between NPR, WNYC and Kaiser Health News. Special thanks to WYNC’s Data Team.

Kaiser Health News (KHN) is a national health policy news service. It is an editorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.