California Watch
News stories in this section spotlight activities in California, including actions by the state Assembly and state Senate; proposed legislation; regulators like the Department of Managed Health Care and Department of Insurance; and the state ACA exchange, Covered California.
Powered by increasing scrutiny of costly prescription drugs, a measure that would require sweeping new disclosure on how medicines are priced cleared its final legislative hurdle Wednesday.
California lawmakers approved several key health care proposals — and stalled on others — in their mad dash toward last Friday’s do-or-die legislative deadline.
The California State Assembly on Monday overwhelmingly approved Senate Bill 17, controversial legislation that could soon become the nation’s most comprehensive law aimed at shining a light on prescription drug prices.
California and several other states will exempt themselves this year from a new Trump administration rule that cuts in half the amount of time consumers have to buy individual health insurance under the Affordable Care Act.
U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris on Wednesday told a crowd of mostly liberal activists that she plans to co-sponsor a “Medicare-for-all” bill pushed by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders that would create a national health insurance system.
Frustration with sky-high hospital bills and a lack of local competition is common to many employers and consumers across the country after years of industry consolidation. Fed up with wildly different price tags for routine operations, some private employers are steering patients they insure to top-performing providers who offer bargain prices. Santa Barbara County, with about 4,000 employees, is among a handful of public entities to join them.
Last year, California’s two health insurance regulators received more than 1,000 requests for help from consumers in self-funded plans. The departments have no authority over those plans and had to refer many of the enrollees to the U.S. Department of Labor, which regulates them.
After the swift rise and sudden crash of California’s ambitious single-payer legislation, complete with melodramatic fallout, universal health care is back — not on the floor, but on the table.
With ongoing uncertainty around the Affordable Care Act (ACA), the board that oversees California’s health care marketplace took action to stabilize the exchange on Thursday. Their goal was to convince insurance companies to continue offering health plans through Covered California.
Less rowdy than the sputtered push for single-payer healthcare and less fraught than the battle over Obamacare’s future, the concern over the cost of prescription drug prices has been overshadowed for the past year by the marquee healthcare battles gripping Sacramento and Washington.