Healthcare Finance Staff

Assurant is advancing plans to wind down its once-profitable health insurance business, though apparently has not found a buyer for it.

Like most mergers and acquisitions, the Aetna-Humana and Anthem-Cigna deals will need a fair amount of cultural alignment to yield the market complementaries and business synergies being promised amid the record-breaking valuations.

Picking the right insurance plans for your budget and health needs is challenging. Weighing monthly premiums and co-pays against yearly deductibles and comparing the benefits different plans offer can make your head spin, especially if you are newly insured.

Another ACA-funded co-op is going under, dissolving rather than confront an "unhealthy future." Many of the others are also struggling to stay in the black.

CMS recently released the long awaited risk adjustment filtering logic for the Medicare Advantage Encounter Data Processing System, requesting comment by August 21. This logic is an important factor in the future of risk adjustment.

Premiums for 1.3 million Covered California consumers will rise an average 4 percent, slightly less than last year's increase of 4.2 percent.

A "sleeper" provision when Congress created Medicare in 1965 to cover healthcare for seniors, Medicaid now provides coverage to nearly one in four Americans, at an annual cost of more than $500 billion. Today, it is the workhorse of the U.S. health system, covering nearly half of all births, one-third of children and two-thirds of people in nursing homes.

A $57 million experiment to deliver better, more efficient care at federally funded health centers struggled to meet its goals and is unlikely to save money.

Anthem will buy Cigna for $54.2 billion, the insurer announced on Friday, in a deal that will reduce the former "Big Five" private health insurers to just three.