Month: June 2015
Immigrant children who are in the country illegally would receive public healthcare coverage in California under a budget deal announced Tuesday by Gov. Jerry Brown and legislative leaders. An estimated 170,000 immigrants 18 and younger could qualify, marking another victory for advocates and lawmakers who have worked to make the state more welcoming to unauthorized ...
California health officials failed to ensure that more than 9 million residents enrolled in Medi-Cal managed care plans had access to doctors when they needed them, the state auditor said in a stinging report Tuesday. Health officials might have learned about those problems from calls to an ombudsman’s office – but thousands went unanswered every ...
The California Public Employees’ Retirement System is poised to raise HMO premiums for state employees an average of 7.21 percent in 2016. The move shows that rising hospital and drug costs could mean higher premiums in the private sector, too. The proposed HMO rate hike is up from a 3.9 percent hike in 2015. Premiums ...
Providing data to insurers on Covered California enrollees’ use of health care services helped to lower premiums, according to a recent study, the Sierra Sun Times reports. Details of Study For the study, researchers from UC-San Francisco, the state Department of Health Care Services and the state exchange examined data from the Office of Statewide ...
Anthem sees its more than $47 billion bid to buy rival Cigna as a way to muscle up on technology that helps consumers and to strengthen its rapidly growing Medicare Advantage business. Leaders of the Blue Cross-Blue Shield insurer reaffirmed on Monday their commitment to getting a deal done a day after Cigna shot down ...
WASHINGTON — The night his administration’s Affordable Care Act passed in 2010, President Obama described the victory the way he hopes historians will: as a “stone firmly laid in the foundation of the American dream.” But Mr. Obama’s prospects for a legacy of expanding health care coverage in the United States for generations have rarely ...
California’s health insurance exchange wants to know why you got sick this summer. With 1.4 million people enrolled, the state-run marketplace is embarking on an ambitious effort to collect insurance company data on prescriptions, doctor visits and hospital stays for every Obamacare patient. Covered California says this massive data-mining project is essential to measure the ...
Gov. Jerry Brown (D) last week issued a proclamation to convene a special legislative session on health care spending on the same day he agreed to a state budget that had many of its health-related provisions negotiated away. Financing the Medi-Cal program may not be sustainable, Brown said, given its expansion over the past two years ...
Having a baby is a common women’s health event, yet insurance coverage isn’t always assured. Although the federal government recently clarified that many insurance plans must cover prenatal care as a preventive service without charging women anything out of pocket, it didn’t address a crucial — and much pricier — gap in some young women’s coverage: ...
The voracious CVS Health is already a dominant player in nearly every corner of the health care world — it is the nation’s largest dispenser of prescription drugs, the biggest operator of health care clinics and the second-largest pharmacy-benefits manager. And with the news Monday that it had agreed to buy Target’s pharmacy and clinic ...