Healthcare Crisis Demands More Efficient Managed Care

Editorial

Caribbean Business

Puerto Rico's economy is having serious problems and none of the government
agencies is safe, not even the Health Insurance Administration (ASES by its
Spanish acronym). Such is the severity of the fiscal crisis that the government
agency in charge of managing the Government Health Plan (GHP) faces the real
possibility that it will have to curtail services or release as many as 850,000 of
the 1.4 million medically indigent beneficiaries who are currently covered by
healthcare reform.

It is astonishing that this most recent version of healthcare reform would face
the possibility of insolvency when the government had assigned to it about $6.4
billion stretched across six years when the Patient Protection & Affordable Care
Act (ACA, or Obamacare) was signed into law in 2011. How did we get into this
insolvent mess?

Several factors have contributed to the potential deficit. In simple accounting
terms, prerequisites of Obamacare, which mandates state coverage for all those
who are medically indigent with catastrophic illnesses, reportedly have driven the
costs of compliance as high as...[CONTINUE READING]