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.
California’s health insurance exchange wants to know why you got sick this summer. With 1.4 million people enrolled, the state-run marketplace is embarking on an ambitious effort to collect insurance company data on prescriptions, doctor visits and hospital stays for every Obamacare patient. Covered California says this massive data-mining project is essential to measure the ...
Gov. Jerry Brown (D) last week issued a proclamation to convene a special legislative session on health care spending on the same day he agreed to a state budget that had many of its health-related provisions negotiated away. Financing the Medi-Cal program may not be sustainable, Brown said, given its expansion over the past two years ...
Having a baby is a common women’s health event, yet insurance coverage isn’t always assured. Although the federal government recently clarified that many insurance plans must cover prenatal care as a preventive service without charging women anything out of pocket, it didn’t address a crucial — and much pricier — gap in some young women’s coverage: ...
The voracious CVS Health is already a dominant player in nearly every corner of the health care world — it is the nation’s largest dispenser of prescription drugs, the biggest operator of health care clinics and the second-largest pharmacy-benefits manager. And with the news Monday that it had agreed to buy Target’s pharmacy and clinic ...
When it comes to long-term care, two facts stand out. First, an estimated 70% of people will need such care, which will be costly. And second, most of them refuse to buy insurance to cover it. The question is, why? Part of the explanation, no doubt, is that long-term-care insurance is expensive. Some people also ...
The Obama administration is announcing Thursday a new preventive health campaign, aimed at helping people who are newly insured under ObamaCare as well as others, better understand and use their coverage. The public awareness initiative, called “Healthy Self,” is intended to help people know about and use the preventive services that are available for free ...
Nearly three in four Americans say the costs of prescription drugs are “unreasonable” — and most blame drugmakers for those prices, according to a poll released Tuesday. The survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation found 74 percent of those taking prescription drugs find the costs unreasonable, as do 72 percent of those not taking such drugs. ...
The two biggest health insurers by revenue, UnitedHealth Group Inc. and Anthem Inc., are seeking to buy smaller rivals in a merger scramble aimed at cutting costs as the companies cope with the federal health-care overhaul. UnitedHealth made a preliminary takeover approach to Aetna Inc. in the last few days, people familiar with the matter ...
Republican lawmakers have floated a number of contingency plans in case the Supreme Court strikes down the Affordable Care Act’s financial subsidies for qualified individuals buying health insurance through the federal exchanges operating in 34 states. The high court is expected to rule later this month in the case of King v. Burwell. While the ...
President Obama and his top aides are increasingly portraying this month’s Supreme Court ruling on Obamacare subsidies as the final showdown for the health care law, saying that if the justices rule in their favor it should be the signal for Republicans to give up their attacks and move on to other fights. Mr. Obama ...