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.
Frustration with sky-high hospital bills and a lack of local competition is common to many employers and consumers across the country after years of industry consolidation. Fed up with wildly different price tags for routine operations, some private employers are steering patients they insure to top-performing providers who offer bargain prices. Santa Barbara County, with about 4,000 employees, is among a handful of public entities to join them.
Last year, California’s two health insurance regulators received more than 1,000 requests for help from consumers in self-funded plans. The departments have no authority over those plans and had to refer many of the enrollees to the U.S. Department of Labor, which regulates them.
After the swift rise and sudden crash of California’s ambitious single-payer legislation, complete with melodramatic fallout, universal health care is back — not on the floor, but on the table.
Joanna Joshua, 39, panicked when she opened a letter from her family’s insurer, Cigna, only to learn it was pulling out of California’s individual market next year.
Some 8.8 percent of the population was uninsured for the first three months of this year, a new government report finds.
SilverSummit Healthplan has agreed to fill Nevada's 14 "bare" counties that were slated to have no insurers on the ObamaCare exchanges next year.
“There’s only one reason why Medicaid was kept in that final version and that’s because of me,” Heller said at a talk in Las Vegas, according to the Nevada Independent.
With ongoing uncertainty around the Affordable Care Act (ACA), the board that oversees California’s health care marketplace took action to stabilize the exchange on Thursday. Their goal was to convince insurance companies to continue offering health plans through Covered California.
Taxpayers who do not have minimum essential coverage (through an employer, a government program, or individual insurance) or qualify for an exemption must pay an individual responsibility tax.
Less rowdy than the sputtered push for single-payer healthcare and less fraught than the battle over Obamacare’s future, the concern over the cost of prescription drug prices has been overshadowed for the past year by the marquee healthcare battles gripping Sacramento and Washington.