Off Topic - Health Policy

Hello All,

As part of my Health Policy class, my assignment is to write to my local and state representatives about changing, or supporting a current health policy. So I thought hmm, there are a lot of great minds on this board, and I would appreciate any ideas. I was thinking along the lines of trying to get the Medicare to cover the sleeve or something along those lines. Given the high cost of health issues related to obesity, you would think it would be a no brainer.
If you have an issue/idea, I'd like to hear it.

Thanks in advance.

I think you found the topic. That would be an excellent one with all the benefits of the sleeve such as resolution of diabetes, sleep apnea, hypertention, lowering of heart attack and stroke risk, probably reducing risk of cancers and may more. I'm not a doc but I don't think I am too far off on what I know about medicine.

Isn't Medicare only for those over age 65? You would be cutting off a ton of people to access. I would broaden it to something about all health insurance plans covering WLS to help with co-morbidities listed above.

I suspect that Medicare coverage for the VSG is already in the works, at the normal glacial pace of most such bureaucratic initiatives. When Medicare started covering the DS about five years ago, the insurance industry was fairly well aligned at classing it as "investigational/experimental" so they didn't have to cover it, but when Medicare finally approved of it, they could no longer use that dodge. This time around, with the VSG, most of the insurance companies already seem to be covering it, so I expect that Medicare won't be too much farther behind since it has already effectively become "mainstream". The main thing that I can see holding it up further, beyond bureaucratic drag, would be a concern that it might be too popular for their budget to afford, as we see in some of the national health countries.

As to those plans that exclude WLS altogether, that is a tougher nut to crack as those are generally employer self-insured plans (as are most with large and mid sized companies, and many smaller ones, too) that don't fall under the normal insurance regulations since they aren't technically insurance, even if the plans are administered by insurance companies such as Aetna, BCBS, UHC, etc. Maybe as things transition over to ObamaCare in the next few years that hole will get plugged (or maybe drilled out further - who knows?)