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Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield has added St. Vincent Health to the "narrow network" of health care providers it uses for Obamacare plans.
St. Vincent's 22 hospitals and nearly 900 physicians on June 1 joined the network Anthem uses for individual health plans it sells on the online exchange created by the Affordable Care Act.
Before that, the only central Indiana hospital systems that were part of Anthem's exchange plans were Community Health Network, Eskenazi Health and most of the county-owned hospitals in the Suburban Health Organization.
It's a significant strategy shift for Anthem, which has tried to limit the number of providers in its exchange networks in exchange for paying them lower fees, betting lowest-priced plans on the exchange would gain the most customers.
Anthem requested a discount from St. Vincent, according to Dr. David Lee, Anthem's vice president for provider engagement, but he declined to say if the insurer actually received a lower price.
"We have to consider a multitude of factors," he said. "Does it add an attractiveness for our customers? Does it add an attractiveness for our brokers?"
Jen Dial, a spokeswoman for St. Vincent, also would not say whether the hospital network had discounted prices for Anthem's Obamacare network.
In a written statement, she said St. Vincent decided to join Anthem's network because being out of it was causing problems for patients.
Anthem's move to broaden its provider network mirrors what other "narrow network" health plans in Indiana have done in the past. For example, the now-defunct M-Plan started in 1989 with a network that included Methodist Hospital and the physicians most closely attached to it.
But before the plan was a year old, it had to add other hospitals and physicians because employers demanded it. Likewise, Advantage Health Solutions Inc., a health insurance plan started by St. Vincent and Franciscan, had to...