TGIF

Ah, it's the beginning of the last federal three day weekend that in turn launches the great federal holiday drought. No more three day weekends until Memorial Day.

The FEHBlog has been reflecting on Sen. Claire McCaskill's opening comments at the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee's business meeting last Wednesday. Sen. McCaskill (D Missouri) is the ranking minority member on the Committee. She bemoaned the fact that the Committee was about to kill the ACA's multi-state program rather than try to fix it.  The multi-state program was an OPM-administered program intended to cover the state based exchanges with commonly designed plans. One of the many problems with the multi-state program was the fact that the participating plans were subject to both OPM and state regulation. Blue Cross tried to help out OPM, but the Blue Cross multi state plans were competing with the local Blues plans in the exchanges. In other words, like many parts of this law, the multi-state program was overkill, and repeal is the proper outcome.

OPM's administration of the multi-state program has unfortunate effects for the FEHBP. As the FEHBlog has mentioned, the large group market in which the FEHB sits has the loosest ACA restrictions while the multi-state program was in the individual market which has the tightest ACA restrictions. The multi-state program allowed OPM to learn about those tighter restrictions and apply them to the FEHBP. Cost curve up.

The point is that Sen. McCaskill should recognize that in many respects the ACA overreached and the best fix is to trim it back.

In a bit of good news, yesterday the Food and Drug Administration approved a blood test for concussions. The results are available in three to four hours. The New York Times reports that

The test, called the Banyan Brain Trauma Indicator, is also expected to reduce the number of people exposed to radiation through CT scans, or computed tomography scans, that detect brain tissue damage or intracranial lesions. If the blood test is adopted widely, it could eliminate the need for CT scans in at least a third of those with suspected brain injuries, the agency predicted.

Well done.