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.
Among all the reasons for rising health insurance premiums, this one might be the most obscure: A long-term care insurer in Pennsylvania just went belly-up.
Employer-provided health insurance is so ingrained in the American workplace that people expect it to continue even as politicians thrash out the role of government in health care. That’s according to polling, business owners and consumers. And in a nearly saturated labor market, employers don’t want to give workers a reason to work somewhere else.
Democrats control every lever of power in California state government, and free from worrying about major losses to Republicans, they’re training fire instead on each other. The latest example is a recall effort against Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon, a strong progressive now targeted by party activists upset that he derailed a bill seeking government-funded health care for all.
A U.S. appeals court decided Monday that the federal government wrongly approved California’s request to temporarily cut Medi-Cal reimbursement by 10% during the recession for hospital outpatient care.
Under preliminary Obamacare rates announced by Covered California, premiums on exchange plans will rise by an average of 5.7 percent in Sacramento, Placer, El Dorado and Yolo counties. That’s less than half of the statewide average of 12.5 percent, and consumers could virtually avoid an increase altogether if they shop around.
Obamacare remains the law of the land, for now, perhaps nowhere more securely than in California.
When Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon (D-Paramount) halted a measure to establish single-payer healthcare in California, the bill's most dedicated backers immediately called for him to be removed from office.
The Senate's top Democrat accused President Donald Trump on Tuesday of childish behavior by threatening to halt federal payments that help millions afford health coverage, saying such a move would impose a "Trump premium tax" by forcing consumers' insurance costs upward.
A Republican, Heller had opposed the original draft legislation to repeal and replace Obamacare but he hadn’t declared how he’d vote on a straight repeal of the health care law.
In a letter to Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), the governors write that the “skinny” repeal is “expected to accelerate health plans leaving the individual market, increase premiums, and result in fewer Americans having access to coverage.”