Author: Scott Welch
Democratic lawmakers say they agreed to fine Californians without health insurance on the condition the state use that money to lower costs for residents purchasing coverage on the state exchange. They say Gov. Gavin Newsom has reneged on the deal.
The bill would require PBMs to meet new transparency requirements and would ban spread pricing in Medicaid. The (PATIENT) Act mandates that PBMs compile annual reports for employers with a slew of key information, including their drug spending, out-of-pocket costs, rebates, formulary placement and acquisition costs.
Health savings accounts (HSAs) offer a tax-advantaged way to save money to pay for certain medical expenses. Your HSA contributions are tax-deductible, so they potentially help reduce your taxable income. But contributions to your health savings account are limited each year by the IRS,
As flexibilities rolled out during the COVID-19 pandemic wind down, there will be plenty of factors at play that could impact uninsured rates in the coming years. Analysts at the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) project that while the rate will increase from current levels, it will decline over the next decade from pre-pandemic levels. They ...
Employers are seeing surging demand from their workers for benefits that cover obesity treatment and this is opening up considerable market opportunities for virtual care players. A recent survey found that 44% of people with obesity would change jobs to gain coverage for treatment. And more than half of workers would stay at a job they ...
Millions of Americans in the past few years have run into this experience: filing a health care insurance claim that once might have been paid immediately but instead is just as quickly denied. If the experience and the insurer’s explanation often seem arbitrary and absurd, that might be because companies appear increasingly likely to employ ...
When the pain kicked in again in February, Lahisha Marquez-Soto held off on going to the hospital for days, until she was struggling to walk out of her college dorm in Carson. Eight days into her stay at MLK Community Hospital, doctors knew she needed another facility. She needed a medical procedure that would allow ...
Four in 10 patients perceive implicit bias in their physicians, according to a MITRE-Harris survey on the patient experience. In addition to patients being extra sensitive to provider bias, the use of AI tools and machine learning models also have been shown to skew toward racial bias. On a related note, a recent study found 60% of Americans ...
Dive Brief: CVS expects its 2024 operating income to drop by $800 million to $1 billion next year due to lost bonus payments from lower plan star ratings in the Medicare Advantage program. Just 21% of CVS’ MA members are currently in plans with a star rating of at least four, down from 87% at the ...
Democrats beat back efforts to attach Medicaid work requirements to a debt limit deal, but the agreement reached over the weekend will claw back about $30 billion of unspent COVID relief funds and likely bring more budget austerity to federal health agencies. Why it matters: GOP negotiators had increasingly insisted that Medicaid work requirements needed to ...