Author: Scott Welch
Living unmedicated with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, Eugenia Hunter has a hard time recalling how long she’s been staying in the tent she calls home at the bustling intersection of San Pablo Avenue and Martin Luther King Jr. Way in Oakland’s hip Uptown neighborhood. Craft coffee shops and weed dispensaries are plentiful here and one-bedroom ...
Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra on Thursday unveiled the Biden administration’s road map to lowering the cost of prescription drugs. The plan, summarized in a 29-page document, supports legislation that allows the federal government to negotiate lower prices on the costliest drugs each year and pass those savings on to private insurers. Current ...
The Affordable Care Act (ACA) requires group health plans to spend a minimum percentage of premium dollars on members’ health care expenses and services. Likewise, it sets a threshold on the maximum amount of premium dollars that can be spent on other administrative costs, such as marketing, profits, salaries, agent commissions, etc. These requirements, known ...
It’s a situation that appears incongruous: Congressional Democrats want to expand Medicare’s benefits while a trust fund that supports the program is facing insolvency. Indeed, some Republican lawmakers have seized on that looming problem as a reason to oppose a proposal to add dental, vision and hearing coverage to Medicare. The provision is included in ...
Payers and hospitals say with the COVID-19 pandemic ongoing and key elements still unreleased, it will be difficult to comply by Jan. 1.
U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy has advised that the Biden administration will “monitor” to ensure no one abuses COVID-19 vaccine exemptions. President Biden last week announced a mandate that required any company with at least 100 employees to mandate its workforce. The only way to avoid the mandate is to claim an exemption on either religious or medical grounds. Some critics ...
The surge of COVID-19 cases caused by the delta variant has employers rethinking their plans for returning to work — and planning for business to stabilize later than expected, a new survey shows. Most employers expected a stabilized business environment by the end of this year, but their confidence has declined from 65% to 57% over the past ...
President Joe Biden’s new Covid-19 plan will mandate vaccines for 100 million working Americans, but one group was conspicuously absent from this week’s announcement: senior citizens. They’re also the most likely to be hospitalized or die from the virus — by a wide margin. Retired seniors have been far more accepting of vaccines than their ...
Hospitals in the heart of California’s Central Valley are running out of beds in their intensive care units, state officials announced Friday, as a more contagious version of the coronavirus continues to spread primarily among the unvaccinated population.
Small business owners understand the value of offering benefits, but some struggle to afford them, and businesses can pay a high price tag for making mistakes in administration of benefits, a new report finds.