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.
At least three major insurers are eliminating broker commissions for some Medicare Advantage plans. According to documents shared with Becker’s, Elevance Health will eliminate commission payments beginning Nov. 1 for new enrollees in some Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield plans in 15 states. The company will still pay commissions to brokers for renewing existing members. Aetna will eliminate commissions ...
In a bid to ease access challenges, CVS Health will offer in-network primary care to Aetna members in certain markets through its MinuteClinics. The services are available to certain individual plan and commercial members in Houston, San Antonio and greater Atlanta, with an eye on future expansion. There are about 1,100 MinuteClinics across the country, ...
Will any legislation surrounding prior authorization, price transparency or individual coverage health reimbursement arrangements (ICHRAs), for example, make it in an end-of-year package? Movement on new electronic prior auth standards may be possible, we learned.
The federal hospital price transparency rules adopted in 2021 have been doing more to cut prices than to spur the cheapest hospitals to raise their rates, according to analysts at Turquoise Health.
Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) is disputing Democrats’ assertion that he wants to repeal ObamaCare after Vice President Harris’s campaign seized on comments he made at a campaign stop this week. “Despite the dishonest characterizations from the Harris campaign, the audio and transcript make clear that I offered no such promise to end ObamaCare, and in fact acknowledged ...
Telehealth companies selling low-cost, compounded versions of popular weight-loss drugs, including Ozempic and Wegovy, are drawing increased interest from employers, Bloomberg reported Oct. 29. Employers are seeing rising employee demand for weight-loss drug coverage. However, the high costs of GLP1s has proven challenging. About 14% of employers covering the drugs are considering dropping coverage due to expense, ...
On October 22, 2024, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) released Revenue Procedure 2024-40, which increases the health flexible spending account (FSA) salary reduction contribution limit to $3,300 for plan years beginning in 2025, an increase of $100 from 2024. Thus, for health FSAs with a carryover feature, the maximum carryover amount is $660 (20% of the ...
About three-quarters (74%) of those surveyed said they feel healthcare costs drive trade-offs for wage or salary increases, with 38% saying they "strongly agree" that this is the case.
A new report by Gusto suggests it's in the best interest of most small businesses to offer their employees' health insurance. The benefits of offering health insurance are profound, from lower turnover to higher productivity.
More than half of insured Americans say they can’t predict how much their covered prescription drugs will cost, according to an annual survey by the pharmaceutical industry trade group PhRMA. Why it matters: The results, shared first with Axios, come as the drug industry is pressing for more transparency regulations on pharmacy benefit managers and insurers in the lame-duck ...