Ferguson speaks to House; HealthSource marketing director departs

HEALTHSOURCE RI DIRECTOR Christine Ferguson responds to questions during the September Providence Business News Summit on the Health Benefits Exchange. To her left are R.I. Health Insurance Commissioner Dr. Kathleen Hittner and Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Rhode Island President and CEO Peter Peter Andruszkiewicz. On Thursday she addressed the R.I. House of Representatives on the progress that the health benefits exchange had made. / PBN FILE PHOTO/MIKW SKORSKI
HEALTHSOURCE RI DIRECTOR Christine Ferguson responds to questions during the September Providence Business News Summit on the Health Benefits Exchange. To her left are R.I. Health Insurance Commissioner Dr. Kathleen Hittner and Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Rhode Island President and CEO Peter Peter Andruszkiewicz. On Thursday she addressed the R.I. House of Representatives on the progress that the health benefits exchange had made. / PBN FILE PHOTO/MIKW SKORSKI

PROVIDENCE – HealthSource RI Executive Director Christine Ferguson delivered a message to members of the R.I. House of Representatives Thursday afternoon: The state’s exchange is a national success story, even as challenges remain for her agency in implementing the Affordable Care Act.

“This has been a very exciting time,” Ferguson said, “probably the most exciting time for health care in the past 40 or 50 years.”

Ferguson did not provide any new data to House members on sign-ups through the state’s health benefits exchange. New numbers come not from HealthSource RI, but from the Executive Office of Health & Human Services’s David Burnett, chief of government & public affairs. Burnett confirmed to Providence Business News Friday that the number of new Medicaid enrollees through HealthSource RI stood, as of Wednesday, at 19,941.

Dara Chadwick, Ferguson’s chief of strategic communications and media relations, has not furnished more detailed data on those who have had interactions with the site.

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Questions that remain include: What percent of enrollees are finding that insurers are not aware of them after they have signed up for insurance through the site? What percent of enrollees’ information has been inaccurately carried to insurers? What percent of enrollees’ have had identification problems using the site, of the kind that plagued HealthCare.gov?

Other questions, less technical in nature, remained as well. How many of the people listed as having bought private health plans were previously uninsured? How many of those listed as having been enrolled into Medicaid through HealthSource RI were not previously on Medicaid?

Ferguson and Chadwick indicated that a new release of data next week would provide the greatest amount of information and metrics to the public to date.

House members asked Ferguson questions at the end of her remarks. Rep. Brian Patrick Kennedy, D-Hopkinton, and chair of the House Corporations Committee, asked how HealthSource RI would be financed moving forward. “Eventually, it will have to be self-supporting,” Kennedy said. “How are we going to do that?”

“That’s a great setup for some of the policy questions that have to be decided in the next few months,” Ferguson said. “People have used this number $26 million, but it’s not what we expect to need, we expect to need less. We have been in consultation with the White House, because so many things didn’t go off so well with the national launch, and that influenced how things unrolled for us. We have talked about the possibility of federal funds being available for part of the fiscal year 2015 budget. There are a lot of possibilities that states have discussed.”

Ferguson said that she had been warned privately that setting up HealthSource RI in such a short time span was not feasible. “[Friends] told me to run away,” she said. “At the federal level, their warnings were borne out, but here our exchange has gone exceptionally well. We have been recognized as one of the best exchanges in the country. That has given people a lot of hope and optimism that we can do something really different.”

She addressed concerns among some in the business community that using the exchange, including the Full Employee Choice option in which employers set a premium by choosing a benchmark plan that employees can opt out of, is too complicated.

“The root issue is that we have to make this easy for people,” she said. “One thing that I have noticed in my experience in health care is that a lot of people in the business community view this as way too complicated. They think it is harder than it is. And this is our opportunity to lay out how simple this really is. No one has taken the time to explain it, and that’s what we’re doing now.”

Ferguson spoke, too, to the perception that brokers traditionally making insurance sales to small- and medium-sized businesses were being squeezed out of the equation by the Affordable Care Act. “A lot of states have gone to war with brokers, and brokers have been really leery about doing business with our exchange. We have made it clear that the services that they provide are things that we cannot provide and those are things that small businesses value.”

Ferguson also responded Thursday at the Statehouse to the just-announced departure of Ian Lang, director of marketing and communication at HealthSource RI. Lang, who worked at the Providence Center prior to joining Ferguson’s team, will return to his old employer on January 22.

“He’s returning to the Providence Center, and starting a new endeavor for them,” Ferguson said. “It’s a great opportunity for him. I’m going to miss him tremendously. When opportunities come like this, you can’t turn them down.”

Lang confirmed to Providence Business News that he would be leading a new venture for the Providence Center: Continuum Behavioral Health, of which he will be executive director. Continuum, whose first location in Randall Square has been up and running since October, represents a significant departure for the Providence Center. For one thing, it is a for-profit subsidiary of one of the state’s best-known nonprofits.

Lang said that it wasn’t easy to leave HealthSource RI, but that he was leaving with a sense of accomplishment.

“It was difficult,” he said. “It has been a tremendous honor to work with all of the people at HealthSource. I’m really proud of what we’ve been able to accomplish.”

Lang said that Continuum was essentially an accountable care organization focusing on behavioral health. “We will be expanding at Continuum. We’ll be adding additional office locations. The Randall Square location has 11 therapists on staff. In terms of how many employees that we’ll hire, it’s not easy to say because a lot of them are therapists. Some of them are at 15 or 20 hours a week and some are there 30 or 40 hours a week. That’s the nature of private practice. We have 250 patients at the moment.”

Lang said that Continuum Behavior was chosen as a name to convey an effort to meet and track patients’ needs and progress in a smoother and more holistic fashion than some previous treatment models. He also said that substance abuse will increasingly be seen more as a disease, no less than physical diseases.
“What we really want to do is provide people with the appropriate level of care given where they are at a given time,” he said. “We’re coming to the conclusion that substance abuse is a medical issue and that it needs to be paid for by health insurance in the same way that diabetes is a medical issue and needs to be paid for by insurance. With the ACA, some parity was created whereby insurance companies cannot put a limit to the number of visits if you don’t have a corresponding limit on a physical condition. It’s basically leveling the playing field.”

“This was such a major opportunity,” Lang said, “It gives me the chance to start something and to get into the behavioral health care field, and for me to play a role in how we provide health care for people going forward. It was just so exciting to be in the launch stage of a new entry in the health care delivery system.”

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