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.
The Affordable Care Act survived its second Supreme Court test in three years, raising odds for its survival but by no means ending the legal and political assaults on it five years after it became law.
Coinsurance? Premium tax credit? HMO and PPO? Swimming through the health insurance word soup can be frustrating for anyone. Even though I cover health, I couldn’t define “cost-sharing reduction plan” until I Googled it just now. And it seems I’m not the only clueless 20-something here. Young adults, who generally have little experience managing their ...
WASHINGTON — Millions of people gained health insurance last year as Affordable Care Act benefits took effect, according to the first official accounting by the federal government. In 2014, 36 million U.S. residents, or 11.5 percent of the population, were uninsured on the day they were surveyed, a decline of 8.8 million people and 2.9 ...
Anthem sees its more than $47 billion bid to buy rival Cigna as a way to muscle up on technology that helps consumers and to strengthen its rapidly growing Medicare Advantage business. Leaders of the Blue Cross-Blue Shield insurer reaffirmed on Monday their commitment to getting a deal done a day after Cigna shot down ...
WASHINGTON — The night his administration’s Affordable Care Act passed in 2010, President Obama described the victory the way he hopes historians will: as a “stone firmly laid in the foundation of the American dream.” But Mr. Obama’s prospects for a legacy of expanding health care coverage in the United States for generations have rarely ...
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 ...