Who Is Using Health Savings Insurance

Posted by IQ HSA on February 26, 2010 · Leave a Comment

Americans choosing Health Savings Account (HSA) coverage represent a wide range of people from all backgrounds and walks of life. Consider the following:

HSA health plans provide comprehensive health coverage for more than eight million Americans.
About 40 percent of tax filer’s age 19-64 who reported HSA activity on their tax returns had average annual incomes below $60,000. (Government Accountability Office, April 2008).
About half of enrollees in an HSA-eligible plan are aged 40 and above, and half are below the age of 40. In the individual market, 25 percent of HSA-eligible plan enrollees were younger than age 20.
The 2009 Kaiser Family Foundation study of employer-based health benefits found that 71 percent of employers that offered HSAs contributed to their employees’ accounts, and that the average contribution for accounts was $1,000 for individuals and $1,640 for families.

The people we work with are saving an average of $2,208/year on their health insurance premiums without sacrificing benefits. You owe it to yourself to find out how a HSA can benefit you. Contact us today at 602-510-7507 or info@iqhsa.com

IQ Financial Group, llc. is a licensed insurance agency in the state of Arizona. We offer a complete selection of health insurance, term life insurance, disability insurance, long term care insurance and supplement plans to individuals, families, self-employed and small businesses throughout Arizona. We offer the best in Arizona Health Insurance.
© IQ Financial Group, llc.

Filed under Health insurance made simple · Tagged with health insurance, health insurance savings, health savings account, health savings insurance, HSA, prevention, wellness

Health Care Reform Bills Impact HSA’s

Posted by IQ HSA on November 4, 2009 · Leave a Comment

Is your HSA being impacted?

Congress will soon vote on health care reform legislation that could harm the more than 8 million Americans who have a health savings account (HSA) and restrict those who want to purchase HSA coverage in the future.

Starting this week, the House of Representatives will begin debate on the Affordable Health Care for America Act, and the Senate is expected to finish work on its version of health care reform shortly.

Both the House and Senate bills make major changes that would impact people with HSAs:

Both bills mandate benefit levels for most health plans that could eliminate HSAs as an option.
Both bills prohibit you from using any money in your HSAs to buy over-the-counter drugs such as allergy medications that you now get without a prescription.
The Senate bill may place a tax on high-value health plans, so-called “Cadillac” plans, by taxing the cost of such coverage, including employer contributions to your HSA.
Both bills raise the penalty for the use of HSA dollars for non-qualified medical expenses from 10% to 20% of the reimbursement.

It is important that you take the time to contact your members of Congress and let them know that you depend on your HSA for affordable coverage and the flexibility to set aside tax-free dollars to pay for your health care expenses.

Click here and enter zip code.

Get quotes for individual/family health insurance in Arizona here. Contact us today at 602-510-7507 to find out how an HSA can benefit you.

Filed under Featured Posts, Health Care Reform · Tagged with affordable, Arizona, catch up, Cheap Health Insurance For Students, contribution, employee benefits, government healthcare, health insurance, health savings account, health-care, healthcare, HSA, Individual Health Insurance, Insurance carrier, limits, low cost, Major medical, Medical Insurance, Medical Savings Account, prevention, reform, Self employed, value, wellness

HSA Tool For Employers And Their Employees

Posted by IQ HSA on October 20, 2009 · Leave a Comment

STREETWISE HSA is a great tool for employers and their employees to maximize the benefits of Health Savings Accounts (HSA). Click on the logo above and check out all of the tools and information available.

Get quotes for individual/family health insurance in Arizona here. Contact us today at 602-510-7507 to find out how an HSA can benefit you.

Filed under Manage Your Health - Consumer Tools · Tagged with affordable, Arizona, catch up, claims, consumer, contribution, employee benefits, health care cost, health insurance, health savings account, health-care, healthcare, HSA, Insurance carrier, insurance premium, limits, low cost, Major medical, Medical Savings Account, prevention, rate increase, Self employed, value, wellness, work

Customer-Driven Medicine: How To Create A New Health Care System

Posted by IQ HSA on October 14, 2009 · Leave a Comment

Darrell M. West, Vice President and Director, Governance Studies
The Brookings Institution

Executive Summary

Thursday, October 08, 2009
10:00 AM to 11:30 AM
Washington, DC

Health care today is dominated by physicians, hospitals, the pharmaceutical industry, insurance companies, and government agencies. Patients seek to navigate their health care by moving across a variety of providers, ordering prescription drugs from pharmacies, and seeking reimbursement from either public or private insurance plans. They spend hours connecting the dots and working out the best health care for themselves and their families. If they are fortunate to have good providers and effective follow-through, they receive high-quality health care.

Imagine a different system where, with the aid of the Internet, electronic medical records, cell phones, and personalized health care, the patient is in charge. People monitor their own weight, blood pressure, pulse, and sugar levels, and send test results via remote devices to health care providers. Patients store their medical records online and have access regardless of where they are in the United States or around the world. They get personalized feedback via e-mail and reminders when they gain weight, have an uptick on their cholesterol levels, don’t take their medicine, or have high blood pressure. Social networking sites provide discussion forums and the benefit of collective experience from other people suffering similar problems. Patients take responsibility for their routine health care and rely on physicians and hospitals for more serious medical conditions.

This system is not a futuristic vision, but is well within our grasp. It would cut costs by reducing professional responsibility for routine tasks and record-keeping, while also making it possible for patients to receive higher quality care and be more satisfied with the end-result. The technologies for this kind of system transformation currently are available through cell phones, remote monitoring devices, video conferencing, and the Internet.

In this paper, I outline a vision for a new health care system based on mobile Health (mHealth), remote monitors, electronic medical records, social networking sites, video conferencing, and Internet-based recordkeeping. It incorporates email reminders to take medicine, a NetFlix-style mechanism to rate experiences with doctors and hospitals, and websites that make ratings publicly available to employers and other patients. Today, there are nearly as many mobile phones (600 million) in existence that can browse the Internet and access email as there are personal computers (800 million).

In order to bring this system to fruition, though, several changes are needed to encourage customer-driven health care. There have to be shifts in public policy and private health care that get the incentives right for patients, physicians, insurers, and hospitals. If we make these changes, we can cut costs while also improving quality and public satisfaction with health care.

Among the specific changes that are required include:

changes in public and private insurance coverage that reimburse health care providers for mHealth care, remote monitoring, electronic communications with physicians, e-prescribing, and downloading medical tests to cell phones and other mobile devices;
rewarding physicians who provide positive health outcomes for their patients, as opposed to paying them for the quantity of tests they have ordered;
greater patient encouragement for preventive health care, good diet, and regular exercise activities and creation of a Preventive Medicine Fund that covers gym memberships, exercise equipment, flu shots, diet advice, smoking cessation programs, and substance abuse treatment;
development of a good health rewards program similar to good driver discounts that provides benefits to patients who lead healthy lifestyles.

Read entire article

Private Lab Testing At A Significant Discount

Posted by IQ HSA on October 6, 2009 · Leave a Comment

M yMedLab, is introducing the public to the future of health care through private diagnostic lab work. This new solution brings the same comprehensive lab testing, once only available to doctors, directly to the public and at a cost that is as much as 80% less than what doctors and local hospital labs charge.

In addition to lower cost and direct access, consumers receive results that are completely confidential and never become part of their permanent medical records unless they provide them. This new approach is set to fundamentally change the way that wise consumers will educate themselves and their families about their health.

David Clymer, President/CEO, explains the MyMedLab concept: “Our mission is to remove the barriers keeping consumers from learning more about their health. The first and most obvious barrier was cost. Even routine testing for conditions like Diabetes and Heart Disease can cost consumers hundreds of dollars in lab fees. This is in addition to the cost of the office visit doctors require to order testing. MyMedLab allows consumers nationwide to order and purchase their testing as part of a group of thousands instead of a party of one. This negotiated group rate means the exact same tests costs 50%-80% less and eliminates the cost of the initial doctors office visit.”

Visit MyMedLab to begin saving today.

Get quotes for individual/family health insurance in Arizona here. Contact us today at 602-510-7507 to find out how an HSA can benefit you.

Filed under Manage Your Health - Consumer Tools · Tagged with Arizona, CNN, confidential, health care cost, healthcare, Lab, low cost, MyMedLab, prevention, Private, Smart Money, Testing, Wall Street Journal, wellness, work

Billionaire Doctor Puts His Money Where His Mind Is

Posted by IQ HSA on October 6, 2009 · Leave a Comment

Published: Monday, 5 Oct 2009 | 12:05 PM ET

By: Jane Wells
CNBC Correspondent

Patrick Soon-Shiong is a very smart guy who’s been told “no” all his life.
Ignoring that, he’s now worth billions. And he wants to turn healthcare on its head.

Oh really? I don’t think you can do that.

“That’s the most exciting time in life, when people tell me I can’t do that,” he says with a laugh. “I don’t know what it is about me, when you say, ‘You can’t do that,’ because then I say, ‘Well, that’s great, because then that’s exactly what I should do.’”

To achieve his goal, Dr. Soon-Shiong is spending $1 billion of a fortune he acquired building and selling drug firm APP Pharmaceuticals. With that money he is hiring the brightest minds in the world to create a smart grid for medical information. He describes it as a “Bell Labs of healthcare”, “a public utility”, and “a medical information superhighway.”

“The idea would be in my mind-and I know it sounds strange-is that the most important advances in medicine would be made not by new knowledge in molecular biology, because that’s exceeding what we can even use,” Dr. Soon-Shiong says. “It’ll be made by mathematicians, physicists, computer scientists, figuring out a way to get all that information together.”

At heart, he wants to use the internet to create a way for all of your medical information to follow you portably, encrypted securely to give you control of access, which can then be combined through the right software with the most up to date medical information relevant to your situation. He points to the way the world responded to the H1N1 virus as a model of how transparency and communication can save lives. “We need to think of chronic disease, hypertension, cancer, like H1N1,” Dr. Soon-Shiong says. “In fact, there’s an epidemic of chronic disease.” Yet currently, if you go to the doctor, who then sends you to a specialist, who maybe sends you to the hospital, “that trail of the patient today is impossible to follow, even by the physicians.” He calls the myriad of proprietary systems of medical record-keeping “medical bridges to nowhere.” The system he wants to build would bring it all together, and you could access it on your iPhone. Oh yeah, he also wants the system to make costs transparent as well. So are the health insurance companies on board with his plan? “Not really.”

The other thing Dr. Soon-Shiong is pushing, which may be even more revolutionary, is to completely change the mindset about healthcare.

He says the industry is currently motivated by treating illness, not by maintaining health.

Doctors and drug companies only make money when you’re sick. There need to be incentives to keep people healthy. Certainly there are incentives for those paying insurance premiums, and some payers are proactively going down this road already. My company, GE [GE 16.26 0.43 (+2.72%) ] , is offering a new health plan starting next year which offers reduced premiums for employees who don’t smoke, as well as 100% coverage for wellness care, i.e., physicals and vaccines. Can we create enough incentives for drug companies and physicians to find profits in preventing illness?

Dr. Soon-Shiong and his wife, actress Michele Chan, recently donated $100 million to St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica to help that facility become a major hub in his “Bell Labs”. He says his smart grid is already being used by several children’s hospitals, where specialists can immediately weigh in online about the best treatment for a sick child. Dr. Soon-Shiong remains chairman of Abraxis BioScience [ABII 38.18 0.94 (+2.52%) ] , which he founded, and he still plans to spin out subsidiary Abraxis Health at some point. Forbes has him as the third richest man in Los Angeles, at $4 billion (behind Eli Broad and David Geffen), but the Los Angeles Business Journal has him at #1 at $6 billion. I asked him which is right. “I have no idea,” he says with a laugh. “That’s not what I focus on.”

If you want to see how this scientist and surgeon sees a way out of what he calls a “mess”, listen here to a large portion of our interview. I keep trying to find weaknesses in Dr. Soon-Shiong’s plan, but he seems to have an answer for everything. Still, does he have enough money to make it happen? Can he convince the government-which he feels is a necessary partner to make the system work in terms of funding and regulations-sign on? Seems unlikely. But here’s a guy who ignored those who told him “no” when he became a doctor at the age of 23 in apartheid South Africa, where he had to work for half the wages of his white contemporaries. He was told “you can’t do that” when he went outside of the medical community, to places like JPL and NASA, to develop radical therapies-whether it was saving diabetics by transplanting pancreas cells encapsulated in seaweed to avoid rejection, or creating a less toxic treatment for breast cancer using nanoparticles, a technology he thinks can be used in treating melanoma and pancreatic cancer.

But change the entire way medical information is shared? Make costs transparent? Change the profit motive? Is he nuts? “I love doing a lot of things I’m told I can’t do,” he says. “I think that’s what drives me and keeps me awake every day.”

Get quotes for individual/family health insurance in Arizona here. Contact us today at 602-510-7507 to find out how an HSA can benefit you.

Filed under Health Care Reform · Tagged with Abraxis BioScience, Arizona, Bell Labs, cnbc, Dr. Soon-Shiong, General Electric, government healthcare, health insurance, health savings account, healthcare, HSA, Jane Wells, prevention, value, wellness

Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System (AHCCCS)

Posted by IQ HSA on September 22, 2009 · Leave a Comment

Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System (AHCCCS) is Arizona’s Medicaid agency that offers health care programs to serve Arizona residents. Individuals must meet certain income and other requirements to obtain services. Click here for more information about AHCCCS.

Get quotes for individual/family health insurance in Arizona here. Contact us today at 602-510-7507 to find out how an HSA can benefit you.

Filed under Arizona Health Resources · Tagged with affordable, AHCCCS, Arizona, care, Chandler, claims, consumer, containment, cost, Gilbert, Glendale, government healthcare, health, health care cost, health insurance, health-care, healthcare, information, Insurance carrier, insurance premium, IRS, low cost, Major medical, Medicare, Mesa, Peoria, Phoenix, prevention, rate increase, Self employed, system, Tempe, Tucson, value, wellness

WebMD Better Information. Better Health.

Posted by IQ HSA on September 18, 2009 · Leave a Comment

WebMD provides valuable health information, tools for managing your health, and support to those who seek information. Click here to begin accessing information.

Get quotes for individual/family health insurance in Arizona here. Contact us today at 602-510-7507 to find out how an HSA can benefit you.

Filed under Manage Your Health - Consumer Tools · Tagged with affordable, Arizona, claims, consumer, government healthcare, health, health care cost, health insurance, health savings account, health-care, healthcare, HSA, information, insurance premium, low cost, Medicare, Phoenix, prevention, rate increase, reform, single payor, Tucson, value, Webmd, wellness