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.
Hospitals are on board with the Biden administration’s increased scrutiny of “inadequate” short-term health plans, and are hoping that the federal government will go further in its crackdown on payers’ “convoluted policies.” In early July, the White House said it was working to reverse a controversial Trump-era rule that expanded the duration of the controversial ...
Many steps remain before older adults see the benefit of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ upcoming talks with drugmakers.
The national Covid emergency has ended, but a new strain of the coronavirus, called EG.5 or “Eris,” is rapidly circulating worldwide. “EG.5 is actually just a subvariant of omicron,” says Dr. Payal Patel, infectious diseases physician at Intermountain Health in Salt Lake City. “We are seeing a rise in this subvariant worldwide. We’re seeing it in the U.S. ...
The Texas Medical Association (TMA) is now 4-0 on its legal challenges to the Biden administration’s rocky implementation of the No Surprises Act, which bans surprise out-of-network medical bills and outlines processes to resolve payment disputes between providers and payers. In a decision filed Thursday (PDF), U.S. District Judge Jeremy Kernodle largely agreed with the association’s late 2022 ...
Last year’s Inflation Reduction Act included what on its face seems a modest proposal: The federal government would for the first time be empowered to negotiate prices Medicare pays for drugs — but only for 10 very expensive medicines beginning in 2026 (an additional 15 in 2027 and 2028, with more added in later years).
The Affordable Care Act (ACA) requires fully insured 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 ...
Minutes after Lainey Arebalo gave birth to her third child last September, hospital staff noticed her son was having trouble breathing. They recommended placing the infant in an ambulance so he could receive care at a better-equipped pediatric facility 23 miles away. Within days of receiving that extra care, Avebalo was able to bring her ...
Arlene Wright is a doctor, but she doesn’t want people to call her one. “I usually tell my patients ‘your majesty’ or ‘your highness’ is fine,” she said. Wright has been a nurse for more than 20 years in Fort Myers, Fla. She began working in hospitals as a teenage candy striper in Upstate New ...
“How much is the ice cream?” A simple enough question, featured on a new TV and online advertisement, posed by a man who just wants something cold. A woman behind the counter responds with a smile: “Prices? No, we don’t have those anymore. We have estimates.” The satirical ad pretends to be a news report highlighting ...
The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on Monday proposed a rule endorsing a broad application of a new federal law extending stronger legal protections to pregnant workers.