The request comes on top of a $3.44 billion loan proposed last week, with costs for undocumented residents running higher than expected.

The $3.44 billion loan, first floated to lawmakers Wednesday, will cover obligations for Medi-Cal, through March, but it’s raising questions about a bigger budget hole that may need to be filled later on. Lawmakers said they were caught off guard by the news and still don’t understand the extent of the shortfall.

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 ...