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.
About half of all American adults get health insurance through their employer, and beginning in 2018, the government will impose heavy financial penalties on any employer-provided health plans it deems overly generous. The tax was designed to rein in health care inflation and raise tens of billions of dollars. Former Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., a ...
Insurance brokers who sold health plans through a failed nonprofit carrier will no longer be paid commissions. Nevada Health CO-OP has stopped commission payments effective immediately, according to a Friday notice from an attorney working on behalf of the Nevada Division of Insurance. “Preliminary review indicates that (Nevada Health CO-OP) is in hazardous financial condition,” ...
Although President Obama signed the Protecting Affordable Coverage for Employees (PACE) Act this week, many employers the legislation is intended to protect remain in limbo. The PACE Act nullifies the Affordable Care Act’s originally scheduled 2016 expansion of the threshold of “small group” for health insurance purposes from employers with 50 or fewer employees and ...
The Nevada Division of Insurance has announced the launch of its Fall Health Insurance Awareness campaign, saying the month of October is a good time to begin thinking about a 2016 health insurance policy. Open Enrollment is just around the corner, starting Nov. 1 and running through Jan. 31, 2016. That is why the Division ...
More than half of uninsured Californians qualify for either Medi-Cal coverage or subsidies under the Affordable Care Act to help pay premiums, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation report released Tuesday, KPCC’s “KPCC News” reports. Medi-Cal is California’s Medicaid program. For the state-by-state report, KFF reviewed data from the 2015 Current Population Survey Annual Social ...
In a series of bundled vetoes, Gov. Jerry Brown sent a hard-to-miss weekend message to state legislators: You dropped the ball before leaving Sacramento for 2015. Brown took action on 80 bills on Saturday, signing landmark legislation on everything from voter registration to farm animal antibiotics. But in a handful of vetoes, the governor quickly ...
As large clocks around the office counted down to Election Day last year, leading physicians ditched their business meeting and marched downstairs to stuff envelopes with campaign pamphlets in a makeshift war room at the California Medical Association’s Sacramento headquarters. No issue confronting voters threatened the pocketbooks and political prestige of physicians more than Proposition ...
Blue Shield of California has won state approval to acquire Care1st Health Plan, but had to make several concessions, including permanently relinquishing its not-for-profit tax exemption, the Los Angeles Times reports. Background Blue Shield proposed the $1.2 billion acquisition of the multi-state Medicaid insurer in December (Terhune, Los Angeles Times, 10/8). Care1st has more than ...
It hasn’t qualified for the ballot. And the measure’s implications are so complicated that even the experts at the Legislative Analyst’s Office had a hard time gauging its fiscal effects. But the proposed “California Drug Price Relief Act” already has the attention of the drug industry, with major companies in recent days donating more than ...
Nearly half of the estimated 700,000 Californians who have dropped their Obamacare policies during the past two years have enrolled in an employer-based plan, a new report from the Covered California exchange shows. In a news conference Thursday, Peter Lee, the organization’s executive director, said there were about 1.3 million Californians enrolled in the exchange’s ...