With the first primaries of the 2016 presidential campaign just months away, the national healthcare debate is poised to enter a new phase, more focused on consumers’ pocketbooks than on re-litigating the 5-year-old Affordable Care Act. Hillary Rodham Clinton, who is campaigning on a detailed program to crack down on rising drug prices and runaway ...

Blue Shield of California has won state approval to acquire Care1st Health Plan, but had to make several concessions, including permanently relinquishing its not-for-profit tax exemption, the Los Angeles Times reports. Background Blue Shield proposed the $1.2 billion acquisition of the multi-state Medicaid insurer in December (Terhune, Los Angeles Times, 10/8). Care1st has more than ...

It hasn’t qualified for the ballot. And the measure’s implications are so complicated that even the experts at the Legislative Analyst’s Office had a hard time gauging its fiscal effects. But the proposed “California Drug Price Relief Act” already has the attention of the drug industry, with major companies in recent days donating more than ...

Nearly half of the estimated 700,000 Californians who have dropped their Obamacare policies during the past two years have enrolled in an employer-based plan, a new report from the Covered California exchange shows. In a news conference Thursday, Peter Lee, the organization’s executive director, said there were about 1.3 million Californians enrolled in the exchange’s ...

During his three decades in the industry, Don Goldmann has made his mark in a number of ways. He got his start in life insurance, then moved to Southern California in the early 1980s just as HMOs were gaining momentum. After years of working his way into the corporate side of the business, he eventually decided ...

In advance of the Nov. 1 start of open enrollment for Covered California, new numbers show that just over half of the state’s remaining uninsured are eligible for health insurance coverage under the Affordable Care Act. The estimate was part of a state-by-state analysis compiled by the Kaiser Family Foundation. Researchers found that California has ...