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.
Employers and private insurance plans in 2020 paid hospitals 224% of what Medicare paid for the same services, with rates for inpatient and outpatient care varying widely from site to site, a new report from RAND finds.
Dive Brief: * Hospitals’ labor costs rose by more than a third from pre-pandemic levels by March 2022, according to a report out Wednesday from Kaufman Hall. * Heightened temporary and traveling labor costs were a main contributor, with contract labor accounting for 11% of hospitals’ total labor expenses in 2022 compared to 2% in 2019, the report ...
Employers need to be forward-thinking regarding employee benefits because this crucial feature can make or break a company. As people are less likely to stay at their current positions, they’re also much less interested in applying with any company that doesn’t offer them benefits such as health care or vacation time.
A new report from Pharmaceutical Strategies Group finds that specialty drugs continue to be a top focus for plan sponsors, in part because they tend to be very expensive.
Alphabet Inc.’s Google will provide any U.S. business over $100,000 worth of online courses in data analytics, design and other tech skills for their workers free of charge, the search company said on Monday.
Covid cases surged during the last two winters and are likely to again this year — unless the country can prepare and act, White House Covid-19 response coordinator Ashish Jha said Sunday morning. “If we don’t get ahead of this thing, we’ll have a lot of waning immunity, this virus continues to evolve and we ...
Prescription drug rebates from drugmakers to commercial health plans are steadily increasing, a study published in JAMA Health Forum shows. Why it matters: This is all part of a system in which drugmakers negotiate to get their product on the formularies of middlemen known as pharmacy benefit managers and health plans. * “While drug rebates can reduce plans’ net costs, ...
An estimated 30 million people did not have insurance coverage last year, bringing the uninsured rate to 9.2%—only slightly below the major high of 9.7% from 2020, new federal data show. The National Center for Health Statistics released its latest report Thursday on estimates for health insurance coverage last year. The data showed slight gains ...
The latest batch of hospital patient safety ratings from the Leapfrog Group shows a general decline among “several” hospital safety measures concurrent with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the healthcare safety watchdog. Released Tuesday, the scores are accompanied by a report from Leapfrog that highlights a “significant” decline in the experiences of ...
Between 5.3 million and 14.2 million enrollees could lose Medicaid coverage next year as the Biden administration is expected to roll back the program’s continuous coverage provision, a new analysis finds. The analysis, released Tuesday by the Kaiser Family Foundation, explores how much enrollment in Medicaid changed during the pandemic, including the impact of a ...