Month: April 2023
On March 30, a single federal judge in Texas struck down a provision of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) that required free coverage for a host of preventive health services for people with private insurance. Under this decision, private health plans are no longer required to cover certain cancer screenings, services or medications to prevent heart disease, or perinatal depression preventive interventions, among others, with no cost sharing.
Since the COVID-19 pandemic began in earnest, low-income Californians who enrolled in Medi-Cal — California’s version of the government-funded Medicaid health insurance program — have been able to keep their coverage without having to prove every year that they still qualified for it. That’s because the Families First Coronavirus Response Act, which President Trump signed ...
The Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS’) highly publicized list of the first Medicare Part B prescription drugs hit with rebates under the Inflation Reduction Act discreetly dropped from 27 to 20, prompting critiques from the pharma lobby over the Biden administration’s swift implementation of the legislation’s drug controls. As spotted by Endpoints, the press release and ...
Last June, the major tracker of inflation—the Consumer Price Index—hit 9.1% but has been receding ever since. Employers should be aware that the healthcare industry will not see a similar reduction in prices and, in fact, should expect costs to rise substantially, according to an expert at Willis Towers Watson. Tim Stawicki, a WTW senior ...
Moderna hopes to offer a new set of life-saving vaccines targeting cancer, heart disease and other conditions by 2030, a spokesperson for the company told CNBC on Monday. The spokesperson confirmed remarks Moderna’s chief medical officer, Dr. Paul Burton, made to the Guardian on Saturday. Burton said he’s confident those jabs will be ready by the end of the ...
President Joe Biden signed legislation Monday to end the national emergency for Covid-19, the White House said, in a move that will not affect the end of the separate public health emergency scheduled for May 11. A White House official downplayed the impact of the bill, saying the termination of the emergency “does not impact our ...
While provider and payer groups were happy that the Biden administration delayed implementation of changes to Medicare Advantage’s (MA’s) risk adjustment model, they hinted at a sustained campaign to get rid of them entirely. Industry reaction to the final 2024 MA payment rule released late Friday details the next fight the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services ...
People 45 and older who have elevated stress levels have been found to be 37 percent more likely to have cognitive problems, including memory and thinking issues, than those who are not stressed, according to research published in the journal JAMA Network Open. For more than a decade, the study followed 24,448 people who also are ...
“California has taken action proactively to enact strong consumer protections into state law, including requirements on health plans to cover preventive care with no cost sharing to enrollees.
About 60% of the 173 million people enrolled in private health coverage used at least one of the Affordable Care Act’s no-cost preventive services in 2018 before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Overall, about 100 million people receive preventive services with no patient cost sharing in a typical year.