We Should Test At Least 1 Million for COVID-19 per Day: AHIP Meeting Speaker

Larry Merlo, chief executive officer of CVS Health, which now owns Aetna, said in a session moderated by Matt Eyles, AHIP’s president, that he thinks health insurers have done a good job of responding to the crisis.

“We have to get a ‘A,’ if somebody was going to grade us here,” Merlo said. “As an industry, we’ve broken down the competitive wall. We’ve communicated, we’ve shared learnings with one another. We’re bringing our forms of innovation into the market.”

The government defines the playing field, but an entire group of companies has worked together to make change happen, Merlo said.

“I’ve never been more proud of our industry,’ Eyles said. “It really has been a remarkable couple of months.”

The Future

Many speakers at many sessions talked about increased use of telehealth being a permanent feature of the U.S. health care system.

They agreed that Congress and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) need to make many emergency regulations that have facilitated increased use of telehealth services permanent.

Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, issued a statement about the need to make some of the temporary federal telehealth changes permanent as AHIP members were meeting.

Some of the temporary HHS telehealth policy changes have involved easing of the usual Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) personal health information privacy and data security rules. HIPAA offered emergency exceptions to help providers offer telehealth services through any services that providers and patients could figure out how to use.

Elizabeth Goodman, executive vice president of government affairs and innovation at AHIP, said in a session featuring AHIP executives that she believes those HIPAA exceptions will expire, and that providers may have to shift some new telehealth services onto platforms that meet HIPAA standards.

Goodman said she believes the COVID-19 crisis will also lead to enormous growth in home-based care, both because of the high incidence of COVID-19 illness in nursing homes and assisted living facilities and because of home care providers’ impressive response to a crisis-related increase demand for home care.

Even before COVID-19 came along, “there has been a large shift from care in nursing homes to care in the home and the community,” Goodman said.

But Medicaid has traditionally favored reimbursement for nursing home care over reimbursement for home care, and the program has been slower to update the reimbursement rules for some types of care than others, Goodman said.

Now, since the COVID-19 crisis started, home care providers have shown that they can deliver advanced services, such as delivering drugs through catheters, and that they have the ability to provide those kinds of services for large numbers of patients, Goodman said.

David Merritt, AHIP’s executive vice president for public affairs, and Goodman, also talked about government financial support for health care.

Goodman said she thinks the enormous budget impact of the crisis has slowed adoption and implementation of new programs, such as Washington state’s new public health plan option program.

But Merritt said he sees broad, bipartisan public support for public health spending.

Goodman said, in response to a question about the possibility that Affordable Care Act opponents could try to roll back the ACA Medicaid expansion program, “nothing is off the table, depending on how bad the budgets get.”

“However,” Goodman added, “I don’t see, from a political standpoint, the politics of denying people health insurance in the middle of a pandemic.”

— Read Health Insurers Look Inward at AHIP Annual Meeting, on ThinkAdvisor.

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