Chris Anderson
At America’s Health Insurance Plans’ Policy Summit last mong, it was impossible not to hear the theme and message AHIP leadership wanted everyone to eat, sleep and breathe: underlying hospital and group medical practice costs are rising too quickly and insurance plans are merely the conduit for how these costs are passed on to the public.
It seems the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services can’t ever get on the right side of the ICD-10 issue. For years it resisted calls to delay the planned implementation date of Oct. 1, 2013, as folks in the industry grappled with overlapping health IT priorities. Now that HHS finally relented, it faces the wrath of healthcare companies who bought into the deadline and have made significant progress toward implementation.
In a story worthy of a prime time serial drama, Highmark Inc. on Sunday fired its CEO Kenneth Melani, MD, for "cause" just four days after Melani was arrested for assaulting the estranged husband of a Highmark employee with whom Melani has allegedly been having an affair.
Building on the success of its patient-centered medical home (PCMH) program with primary care physicians, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas City announced it has inked a deal with St. Luke's Health System, the first under its new hospital-focused Collaborative Value Program.
Nine separate healthcare societies in conjunction with the ABIM Foundation's Choosing Wisely campaign have identified 45 medical tests and procedures that are commonly used but not always necessary in their respective practice areas.
Chemotherapy treatments for privately insured patients delivered in an outpatient hospital setting cost 24 percent more than when the treatments are provided in a doctor's office, according to a new study by Avelere Health.
A new poll from the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press and The Washington Post shows that the Supreme Court hearings last week on the Affordable Care Act damaged the opinion people have of both the court and the law.
By a vote of 3-1 the commissioners of the Federal Trade Commission have given the go-ahead for pharmacy benefits manager Express Scripts to complete its $29 billion merger with rival PBM Medco.
If the Supreme Court follows its usual schedule, by the end of today nine people will know the fate of the Affordable Care Act and the individual mandate. It will likely be nearly three months before the rest of us know how the Justices voted today.
Day two of hearings at the Supreme Court yesterday found the justices pressing the federal government's case by searching for analogies in a host of other industries -- ranging from burial services and telecommunications to food and emergency services -- in order to better understand the nature of the individual mandate.