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.
Californians are getting barraged with online pop-up ads, radio spots and television commercials, all aimed at persuading them to sign up for Affordable Care Act health plans during this year’s open-enrollment season.
Just a few decades ago, small businesses in California often banded together to buy health insurance on the premise that a bigger pool of enrollees would get them a better deal. California’s dairy farmers did it; so did car dealers and accountants. But after a string of these “association health plans” went belly up, sometimes in the wake of fraud, state lawmakers passed sweeping changes in the 1990s that consigned them to near extinction.
Congressional negotiators are making progress towards a bipartisan deal to reauthorize children’s health insurance and several other important health-care programs, sources say.
Health-care issues are at the top of Congress’s hefty December to-do list. Republicans spent much of the year on a failed bid to repeal and replace ObamaCare. That’s left several programs and taxes hanging in the balance as the year draws to a close, in addition to the latest health-care drama thrust into the GOP tax-reform debate.
The pace slowed in the third week of enrollment for 2018 Obamacare individual insurance as nearly 800,000 people signed up through the federal government website HealthCare.gov, down about 75,000 people from the previous week, a U.S. government agency reported on Wednesday.
The percentage of Californians without health insurance reached a record low 6.8 percent during the first six months of 2017, according to new estimates from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Since 2015, applicable large employers (ALEs) have been required by the Affordable Care Act (ACA) to offer their full-time employees (and their dependent children) health coverage or face a section 4980H(a) or (b) employer shared responsibility payment (ESRP).* (For some employers, transition relief delayed this mandate.) Also since 2015, ALEs have been required to prepare, furnish, and file IRS Forms 1094/1095-C. These forms provide the IRS with data it needs to determine if an ALE owes an ESRP. However, while employers addressed these mandates by spending several years grappling with new administrative challenges and worrying about potential penalties, it did not appear that the IRS had actually assessed any ESRPs. That situation just changed.
While the Affordable Care Act’s fifth open enrollment season is off to a surprisingly good start, many uninsured people said they weren’t even aware of it, according to a survey released Friday.
SynerMed, a company that manages physician practices serving hundreds of thousands of Medicaid and Medicare patients across California, is planning to shut down amid scrutiny from state regulators and health insurers.
About two months after federal funding lapsed for the Children’s Health Insurance Program, state officials still don’t know exactly when they’ll run out of money or when Congress will renew funding — leaving families that depend on the program increasingly anxious about their benefits.