In an era of rising inflation and trillion-dollar deficits, there appears to be growing bipartisan support for fiscal restraint. President Biden’s recent budget proposal featured more than $1 trillion in deficit-reducing policies. And his administration is now promising that the proposals once comprising the president’s Build Back Better agenda will be, at worst, deficit neutral. But despite ...

Unauthorized immigrants over age 49 who fall below certain income thresholds are now eligible for full coverage by Medi-Cal, California’s version of Medicaid, the federal-state partnership that provides health insurance to low-income people.

For Medicare beneficiaries wondering whether their Part B premiums could be reduced, the waiting continues. More than three months after Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra ordered a reassessment of this year’s $170.10 standard monthly premium — a bigger-than-expected jump from $148.50 in 2021 — it remains uncertain when a determination will come and ...

California’s budget surplus has more than doubled since January to a staggering $68 billion, Senate Democrats said Thursday, prompting a flurry of new spending proposals from lawmakers that include giving $8 billion back to taxpayers in a move that highlights a disagreement with Gov. Gavin Newsom. While the pandemic had prompted warnings of multibillion-dollar budget ...

Spending on medicines in the United States, at estimated net manufacturer prices, reached $407 billion in 2021, up 12% over 2020, as COVID-19 vaccines and therapeutics became widely available and added $29 billion in related spending. That’s according to a new U.S. Medicines Trends 2022 Report, released today by the IQVIA Institute for Human Data Science. In ...

Nurses from Stanford and Lucile Packard Children’s hospitals who went on strike last week are set to return to work Tuesday after their union reached a tentative agreement on Friday with Stanford Health Care.The agreement, if ratified Sunday, will put an end to the nearly week-long strike that union members had overwhelmingly approved as they ...