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.
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, ...
Blue Shield of California CEO Lois Quam is stepping down after two months on the job. The nonprofit health plan will begin a search for a permanent CEO and has appointed CFO Mike Stuart as interim president and CEO, according to a March 11 news release. Mr. Stuart was appointed Blue Shield’s CFO in 2022 and previously ...
Dr. Mehmet Oz, President Donald Trump’s pick to oversee Medicare, Medicaid and Obamacare, told senators a combination of investments, technology, and regulatory changes could both bring down costs and make America healthy again. “We have a generational opportunity to fix our health care system and help people stay healthy for longer,” Oz told senators on ...
The White House on Tuesday asserted President Trump would not cut Social Security or Medicare after tech billionaire Elon Musk’s comments about the need to examine entitlement spending gained traction. Musk, a top Trump adviser leading the effort to overhaul the federal workforce through the Department of Government Efficiency, appeared on Fox Business Network on Monday for a rare television interview, where he noted that most ...
The Trump administration issued its first major set of proposed changes to the Affordable Care Act on Monday that federal officials said are intended to crack down on fraud in the program. Policy experts said they will make it harder for consumers to sign up for coverage, potentially reducing enrollment.
CMS issued the “Marketplace Integrity and Affordability Proposed Rule”. The rule proposes additional safeguards to protect consumers from improper enrollments and changes to their health care coverage, as well as establish standards to ensure the integrity of the Marketplaces.
Average monthly premiums for families with employer-provided health coverage in California’s private sector nearly doubled over the last 15 years, from just over $1,000 in 2008 to almost $2,000 in 2023, a KFF Health News analysis of federal data shows. That’s more than twice the rate of inflation.