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 IRS has announced new 401(k) contribution limits for 2025. In its release Friday, the agency increased the employee deferral limit to $23,500, up from $23,000 in 2024. The change applies to workplace plans, including 401(k)s, 403(b)s and most 457 plans, along with the federal Thrift Savings Plan. The IRS also unveiled 2025 catch-up contribution limits for savers age ...
Physicians will see their Medicare reimbursement fall 2.9% next year if Congress doesn’t stop the cuts. Meanwhile, reimbursement for hospital outpatient departments is rising 2.9%.
Just over 4 in 10 U.S. workers are extremely or very satisfied with their benefits packages, the 2024 EBRI/Greenwald Research Workplace Wellness Survey found. This percentage is in line with previous years of the survey. Health insurance is most often mentioned as a top benefit when deciding whether to stay at a current job or leave (72%), ...
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 ...