Industry Updates
This broad category includes articles concerning health insurance costs, carrier and health plan news, changing benefits technology, and surveys by the Kaiser Family Foundation and others on employee benefits.
Four in 10 employers offer low or no-deductible plans, and 15% of employers will offer their employees coverage with no premium, according to Mercer’s “Health and Benefit Strategies for 2024” report. The report, published Nov. 17, surveyed 1,917 public and private employers. The number of employers offering free coverage to employees increased from 11% from 2022. ...
President Joe Biden on Monday invoked a Cold War-era measure to boost investment in U.S. manufacturing of medicines and medical supplies that he has deemed important for national defense. Biden used the first meeting of his supply chain resilience council to boast about his administration efforts to improve supply chains upended by the COVID pandemic ...
President Barack Obama famously told Americans they could keep their doctors. At the rate things are going, it won’t be long before many Americans don’t have one in the first place — at least not the way they’re used to. The math is simple: Medical schools just aren’t churning out doctors fast enough to keep ...
Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Company has inked its latest partnership, joining forces with Expion Health to address the rising cost of specialty drugs. Cost Plus Drugs’ pricing model will integrate into Expion’s dynamic pricing technology, harnessing the power of both for speciality medications. Expion’s tool and Cost Plus Drugs’ approach together “equips payers with ...
A health Flexible Spending Account (FSA) is an employer-sponsored benefit that allows eligible employees to save pre-tax dollars to pay for qualified medical expenses. Employees can elect a specific dollar amount, up to a certain limit, to set aside annually.
Booming demand for newer weight-loss and diabetes drugs is expected to accelerate the rise in medical expenses for employers in the United States next year, staff health benefits consultant Mercer said on Friday. GLP-1 medications approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration could contribute between 50 and 100 basis points to the trend, Mercer’s ...
The U.S. government on Monday will start taking orders for another round of free COVID-19 tests for delivery across the country, a Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) spokesperson said. Households that had ordered four free tests through COVIDTests.gov when they were offered again in September are eligible to order four more, while those that did ...
The Food and Drug Administration has finalized a long-running effort to require prescription drug ads on TV and radio to clearly lay out potential side effects and when a person should avoid a medicine. Why it matters: While the number of drug ads has surged and they account for billions of dollars in direct-to-consumer marketing, experts say they primarily rely ...
The Biden administration’s first major step toward imposing limits on the pharmacy benefit managers who act as the drug industry’s price negotiators is backfiring, pharmacists say. Instead, it’s adding to the woes of the independent drugstores it was partly designed to help. The so-called PBMs have long clawed back a fee from pharmacies weeks or ...
Employers will be facing a changing landscape when it comes to health care in 2024, as they continue to see significant spending in the areas of mental health, prescription drugs and cancer treatment, says a new survey.