Month: December 2019
More than $12 billion is at stake for the nation’s health insurers Tuesday when the Supreme Court hears another Affordable Care Act case.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's bill that would let Medicare negotiate prices with drug companies would save the government $456 billion over ten years, according to an analysis released Tuesday.
Health care spending grew last year but shrunk as a portion of overall spending. A new analysis published in Health Affairs by Micah Hartman, a statistician in the CMS Office of the Actuary, finds that national health care spending increased by 4.6 percent in 2018 to $3.6 trillion, or 17.7 percent of the overall economy. That’s down from 17.9 percent the previous year.
State Sen. Jim Beall is angry. Four times now, he has introduced legislation to better enforce state and federal “parity” laws, which require equal treatment of mental and physical health problems. Four times, that legislation has failed. As he enters his final year in the Legislature, the San Jose Democrat plans what he calls a “full-frontal assault”. “I’m going to put even more effort into next year,” Beall said, “because I’m madder than hell about it.” California’s parity mandate was signed into law in 1999, and a federal parity law followed in 2008. But the state has struggled to ensure those laws work‚ which helps explain why parity feels like an empty promise to so many Californians. More than half...
Prices for prescription drugs edged down by 1% last year, a rare result driven by declines for generics and slow, low growth in the cost of brand-name medications, the government said Thursday.
Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Administrator Seema Verma pushed back on hospitals' resistance to publishing payer-negotiated prices, as now mandated by a federal rule.
Saturday is the deadline for most people with Medicare coverage to sign up for private drug and medical plans for next year. But members of Congress, health care advocates and insurance agents worry that enrollment decisions based on bad information from the government’s revamped, error-prone Plan Finder website will bring unwelcome surprises.
President Donald Trump has personally tried to settle the long-running feud between his two top health appointees, telling his health secretary to fix the relationship with his Medicare chief, said three individuals with knowledge of the situation.
More than two years after California’s surprise-billing law took effect, there’s one thing on which consumer advocates, doctors and insurers all agree: The law has been effective at protecting many people from bills they might have been saddled with from doctors who aren’t in their insurance network.
More than 1,000 employers, insurers, unions, and other organizations on Thursday urged Senate leaders to scrap a controversial tax on expensive employer-sponsored health plans that's set to go into effect in 2022.