Mid-week miscellany

The FEHBlog is pleased to see that NARFE, an organization for federal employees and retirees, has expressed its opposition to the Postal Service's ill-advised proposed to pull its employees and annuitants out of the FEHB Program and the federal retirement programs.

Standard and Poors announced today that "Data released today by S&P Indices for the S&P Healthcare Economic Composite Index indicate that the average per capita cost of healthcare services covered by commercial insurance and Medicare programs increased by 5.61% over the 12-months ending June 2011. Since posting its lowest annual growth rate in its more than six-year history – +5.37% in April 2011 – the rate for this index accelerated in both May and June."

The FEHBlog ran across an interesting Stanford Medical School blog called Scope. The FEHBlog had read articles this week about legal pressure being placed on insurers to cover an experimental autism treatment called applied behavioral analysis. A posting in this blog recounts these developments and observes "The stakes in these cases are pretty high as the cost for covering all requests for ABA would be a substantial sum. There is, of course, no cure for autism, and until there is, many families will be demanding these services." Sad, but true.