Compliance
This section focuses on health care compliance and regulations – both national and state – including the ACA. It includes changes in health care law, regulation, and court decisions and their impact on health insurance professionals, employers, and individuals.
Biden To Reopen ACA Insurance Marketplaces As Pandemic Has Cost Millions Of Americans Their Coverage
President Biden is scheduled to take executive actions as early as Thursday to reopen federal marketplaces selling Affordable Care Act health plans and to lower recent barriers to joining Medicaid.
For weeks President Biden has emphasized that his goal for rolling out the coronavirus vaccine was an easy-to-remember 1 million shots a day, or 100 million vaccinations in his first 100 days. On Monday, he suggested a much faster clip, saying he could envision 1.5 million vaccinations per day.
For more than a decade, employers have been searching for ways to reduce the ever-escalating cost of employee health insurance, while still offering a strong benefits package. By partnering with nontraditional brokers, many employers were making headway; some even began to spend less while offering more-comprehensive benefits. Then came the pandemic, and all bets were ...
Joe Biden ran on an expansive health care platform during his 2020 presidential campaign, with a broad array of promises such as adding a government-sponsored health plan to the Affordable Care Act and lowering prescription drug prices. Perhaps most significantly, he pledged to get control of the COVID pandemic that claimed more than 400,000 American lives ...
Many of the COVID-19 relief provisions included in the Families First Coronavirus Response Act (FFCRA), the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, Economic Security Act (CARES), and Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Notice 2020-29 were set to expire at the end of the 2020 calendar year. As infection rates continued to soar into the holiday season, employers and group health plan ...
Large hospitals and health systems have been inconsistent in their approaches to compliance with a major new rule that requires them to post payer-negotiated rates online, and experts warn this could cause confusion for consumers. Hospitals had to post the payer-negotiated rates for 300 shoppable services online starting Jan. 1. But while some hospitals have posted spreadsheets with their ...
With most Americans focused on COVID-19 vaccines, pharmaceutical companies are quietly raising the list prices of name-brand prescription drugs at a torrid pace. January is typically when increases hit the U.S. market. Already, more price hikes by drugmakers have been recorded in less than half a month (813) this year than for all of January 2020 (737), according to research by Ohio ...
President Biden plans Thursday to issue a new national strategy to respond to the coronavirus pandemic and to take executive actions intended to make tests and vaccines more abundant, schools and travel safer, and states better able to afford their role in the long road back to normal life. On his second day in office, ...
A COVID financial relief program which helps small businesses continue to pay workers resumed offering loans this week, the Small Business Administration (SBA) announced. The Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) was reopened to businesses that did not receive a first round forgivable PPP loan on Monday. The program expanded to accept applications from certain businesses that did receive funding during the first round (so-called “Second Draw” businesses) on Wednesday.
CMS will raise Medicare Advantage plan payments by 4.08%, the agency announced Friday. It also signed off on its controversial proposal to complete a multiyear phase-in of a new payment methodology. The new process will adjust plan payments using diagnoses solely from encounter data—information created by healthcare providers about patients’ medical conditions and treatment.