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.
Industry giant UnitedHealthcare is adding its voice to the chorus of insurers criticizing the current state of the No Surprises Act’s independent dispute resolution process. During the company’s earnings call on Thursday morning, company executives pointed to IDR as a drag on its commercial business. Dan Kueter, CEO of UnitedHealthcare Employer and Individual, said during ...
The Trump administration proposed major changes to Medicare payment policies that will block third-party vendors from remote patient monitoring. The changes, health tech leaders say, will significantly disrupt services that help patients manage conditions like diabetes and hypertension. The policy change, tucked inside a hefty Medicare physician pay draft rule released this week, marks a shift with ...
One year after the Trump administration announced that dozens of health insurers had signed a six-part pledge promising to reduce barriers to doctor-recommended care, some insurers now say they won’t implement all the promised initiatives. Meanwhile, patients, their advocates, and clinicians say little has improved. “It has never been this bad for patients,” said U.S. Rep. Greg ...
In 2021, the California Assembly introduced a new bill, AB 1400, which – if passed – would have eliminated health care in California, as we know it today. Instead, all health care in California would be provided by one new “Single Payer” system called “CalCare” – with no other options for Californians. The move would have eliminated all existing ...
Patients are not waiting for health care to modernize. They are already using artificial intelligence to ask questions about symptoms, medications, diagnoses, treatment options, bills, benefits, and where they should seek care. The debate about whether consumers will adopt AI in health care is effectively over. The more important question for brokers and benefits advisors ...
California Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara approved workers’ compensation advisory pure premium rates that average 10.4% than last year. The Workers’ Compensation Insurance Rating Bureau of California submitted a pure premium rate filing in May to the commissioner proposing September 1, 2026 advisory pure premium rates that average 10.4% higher than the average of the approved September 1, ...
ACA Marketplace insurers are proposing a median premium increase of 14% for 2027 — indicating a likely second consecutive year of double-digit increases. If these hold, typical premiums for insurers participating in the ACA Marketplaces would jump by more than one-third between 2025 and 2027.
The sudden death of Sen. Lindsey Graham has removed a longtime opponent of the Affordable Care Act’s major medical insurance provisions from the Senate and changed the gameboard for efforts to pass “Reconciliation 3.0” legislation this year. Graham, 71, died Saturday shortly after returning home from a trip to Ukraine. The cause of death was ...
The federal watchdog for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) generated $5.56 billion in expected recoveries and projected savings over a six-month period, according to a report issued Monday, and it barred just more than 1,200 individuals and companies from federal programs. The HHS Office of Inspector General (OIG), in a semiannual report to ...
A trade group representing nearly 5,000 independent pharmacies has filed a lawsuit alleging that Prime Therapeutics entered into an anticompetitive agreement with Cigna’s Express Scripts to fix pharmacy reimbursement rates and fees. The complaint was filed last week in federal court in Washington, D.C., by Protecting Access to Retail Pharmacy, which operates under the name ...