HHS revealed a sample of insurance forms Wednesday that private payers will have to mimic as part of health reform to help customers understand and choose their coverage, according to an HHS news release.  

The forms are part of a set of proposed rules, not set would not take effect until 2012, that would have payers provide literature to currently enrolled and window-shopping customers outlining benefit plans in plain language as well as offer a standardized glossary of commonly used terms like “copay” and “deductible,” without fine print (text is not to be smaller than 12-pt. font).

Your peers across wide swaths of the country are seeing financial losses, while average physician compensation increased only 2.4% in 2010, according to a recent survey by the American Medical Group Association (AMGA). The data is very similar to 2010 findings by another major physician advocacy group, the Medical Group Management Association (MGMA). Compared to 2.4% for the AMGA, our analysis of MGMA’s member survey showed a roughly 2.2% increase in average physician compensation in 2010.

HHS released three proposed rules Aug. 12 on establishing Affordable Insurance Exchanges (AIEs) as part of a team effort with the U.S Treasury department to increase patient access to care, according to a CMS news release.

Remember: AIEs were created by health reform and will begin coverage in 2014. To date, HHS has granted $185 million to 13 states and Washington, D.C. to go toward constructing AIEs.

“Today we’re laying the foundation to provide tax incentives to help working families purchase health insurance,” said Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.   “This new tax credit brings us a big step closer to achieving one of the signature goals of the Affordable Care Act – to provide tens of millions of Americans with access to affordable health insurance coverage.”

Expect to see incentive money for the 2010 Medicare Electronic Prescribing (eRx) Incentive Program to start arriving. CMS has begun doling out the bonus cash for qualifying providers and plans to finish handing it out by Aug. 31. Also, remember that as of January 2010, CMS began using the new LE indicator on your electronic remittance advices to indicate that a given payment was an incentive payment, not just reimbursement for services. To get even more specific, CMS created 4-digit codes to distinguish the source of incentive (e.g., e-Rx versus electronic health record or EHR bonus).

CMS released new data Aug. 10 on first-year provider participation for the Physician Quality Reporting System (PQRS) and E-prescribing (e-Rx) program initiatives.

The report revealed that despite having better participation, PQRS participants fared worse on average bonus collection than successful e-prescribers by over $1,000 per provider. Each e-Rx participant took home around $3,000 in comparison to PQRS providers who only nabbed $1,956, according to CMS’s report.