Month: June 2021
Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) on Sunday threw his support behind a push, led by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), to add dental, vision and hearing coverage to Medicare. “There is a gaping hole in Medicare that leaves out dental, vision, and hearing coverage. This is a serious problem,” Schumer wrote on Twitter.
Over the next month, California Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara will review rates recommended by the Workers Compensation Insurance Rating Bureau, a nonprofit which evaluates trends, including the costs of potential claims.
In any other year, an employee would likely automatically renew benefits during their open enrollment period without a second thought. But the pandemic exposed flaws in open enrollment platforms and procedures throughout the country, and experts say long term changes are in the works for 2021 and beyond.
A new initiative aiming to create cheaper generic drugs for retail pharmacies signed on Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield — one the largest insurers in the U.S. — as well as drug manufacturer Catalent as partners, officials announced this morning.
U.S. prescription drug spending will jump at least 8% by the mid-2020s as a controversial new Alzheimer’s disease drug hits the market, a new analysis finds.
A health care lawyer says the new U.S. Supreme Court ruling on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act is about more than procedural rules. Stephen Lucke, a partner at law firm of Dorsey & Whitney and the co-chair of the firm’s health litigation group, contends in a commentary on the ruling that the court majority clearly ...
A 2017 California law that banned drugmaker copay coupons failed to increase the use of generic drugs, according to a study from Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. The study, published June 15 in JAMA, found that the law did not meet its goal to boost use of generic drugs instead of patients’ relying on copay coupons ...
The pandemic-caused recession and a federal requirement that states keep Medicaid beneficiaries enrolled until the national emergency ends swelled the pool of people in the program by more than 9 million over the past year, according to a report released Thursday. The latest figures show Medicaid enrollment grew from 71.3 million in February 2020, when ...
The highly infectious delta coronavirus variant is rising fast in California, with cases more than doubling in the past month and tripling in one Bay Area county, according to genomic sequencing results reported by state and local public health departments. The first California cases of delta, a variant that emerged in India, were reported in ...
This week, the Standards Board of the California Division of Occupational Safety and Health (Cal/OSHA) adopted revisions to the COVID-19 emergency workplace rules. The changes approved at the Standards Board’s June 17 meeting make Cal/OSHA’s COVID-19 Emergency Temporary Standard (ETS) more consistent with face mask guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and California ...