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.
President Obama’s signature health care law, the Affordable Care Act (ACA), has now been shaping the private health insurance market for over a decade. The law survived several repeal efforts by Republicans. And then-President Biden twice delivered temporary expansions of subsidies offered under the law for the purchase of insurance. Despite its political staying power, ...
The membership club retail chain has expanded its partnership with telehealth company Sesame to launch a weight loss program that costs $175 for three months, which does not include the cost of the weight loss drugs.
23andMe customers who once turned over the most personal form of information to the company — their own genetic data — may want it back after the personal genomics and biotech startup declared bankruptcy on Sunday. The 19-year-old company is seeking a buyer, which means that if it is not deleted, customer data could be transferred ...
Spring has sprung, and round two of the Inflation Reduction Act's (IRA's) negotiation period has begun. Each of the drugmakers that make the fifteen medicines selected for 2027 price cuts have officially signed on to the process, giving the go-ahead for the price talks to begin.
Cigna has officially sealed the deal on the $3.3 billion sale of its Medicare business to Health Care Service Corporation. HCSC acquired Cigna’s Medicare Advantage, Part D, supplemental benefits and CareAllies units as part of the deal. While it will no longer operate the Medicare unit directly, Cigna said it will continue to provide pharmacy ...
Small-group health insurance premiums are still going up at about the same rate as before, and the enrollee count continues to fall. The average monthly premium increased 6.1% in 2024, to $659. The rate of increase was down, slightly, from 6.2% in 2023.
The new-generation weight-loss drugs work very well at preventing obesity, diabetes and death, but they are still much too expensive to be a good financial value for employer plans or other payers, researchers report in a new paper published by JAMA Health Forum. Semaglutide, the GLP-1 agonist drug that powers Wegovy, could cost less than $100,000 per ...
As the new Congress and administration are settling in, all eyes in Washington are focused on the trillion-dollar question: whether and how to pay for the expiring provisions of the 2017 Tax Cuts & Jobs Act (TCJA), signed into law in President Trump’s first term. Among the various revenue-generating proposals emerging from GOP circles — ...
Managers of the Affordable Care Act public exchange system want HealthCare.gov and the state-based exchanges to tighten up. The Centers for Medicaid and Medicaid Services, the federal agency that oversees the ACA exchange system, hopes to make all ACA public exchanges start their annual open enrollment periods Nov. 1 and end the open enrollment periods ...
The insurance industry relies on a steady flow of publicly available data to predict losses, price policies, and mitigate financial exposure. What happens when those data streams dry up? We’re on the verge of finding out. Recent governmental workforce reductions, agency closures and “streamlining” initiatives fostered by President Donald Trump, his unelected advisor, Elon Musk, ...