Recent Articles

A federal district judge ruled this month, in a lawsuit brought by House Republicans, that the Obama administration lacks the authority to pay cost-sharing subsidies to health insurers if Congress has not appropriated the funds. Some civil servants in the administration may agree. The House Ways and Means Committee released a deposition Tuesday of David Fisher, former chief risk officer…

The American people have become familiar with ObamaCare’s failings: higher premiums, fewer choices and a more powerful federal health bureaucracy. Yet another important piece of health-care legislation, signed into law last year, has gone almost unnoticed. The Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act, known simply as Macra, was enacted to replace the outdated and dysfunctional…

UnitedHealth Group Inc. is leaving California’s insurance exchange at the end of this year, state officials confirmed Tuesday. The nation’s largest health insurer announced in April it was dropping out of all but a handful of 34 health insurance marketplaces it participated in. But the company had not discussed its plans in California. UnitedHealth’s pullout…

Two recently filed lawsuits illustrate continuing difficulties the administration faces in implementing the Affordable Care Act, particularly under the constraints imposed upon it recently by Congress. Specifically, the suits illustrate the legal difficulties for the administration created by Congress’ limiting of “risk corridor” payments—made to insurers with high claims costs—to amounts contributed to the risk…

Ohio’s co-op will become the thirteenth of the 23 co-ops created under the Affordable Care Act to fold. The Ohio Department of Insurance requested to liquidate the state’s health insurance co-op, InHealth Mutual, the state announced Thursday. Nearly 22,000 Ohio residents will have 60 days to replace their InHealth policy with another company’s on the federal exchange.…

On Jan. 13, 2014, a team of Internal Revenue Service financial managers piled into government vans and headed to the Old Executive Office Building for what would turn out to be a very unusual meeting.   The clandestine nature of the session underscores the intense conflict over Obamacare spending, which is the subject of a…

Blue Cross Blue Shield of Texas, facing massive losses for its ObamaCare plans, has requested a 58% premium hike for 603,000 customers. The company is pricing in the claims experience of customers that’s been far higher than expected after suffering a $770 million loss on its exchange plans in 2015, equal to 26% of premiums. Overall,…

News that a CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield subsidiary will stop selling bronze level plans on the Virginia marketplace next year prompted some speculation that it could signal a developing movement by insurers to drop that level of coverage altogether. The reality may be more complicated and interesting, some experts said, based on an analysis of plan data. Bronze…

A few weeks ago, the administration issued new regulations in a last-ditch attempt to save the few remaining CO-OP organizations. The first change would limit the restriction on people with health insurance experience to those who have been “an officer, director, or trustee,” and it limits “pre-existing insurer” to those to who were active in…

The House Oversight Committee released a report Wednesday detailing extreme misconduct surrounding Oregon’s failed $305 million taxpayer funded Obamacare exchange and is calling on the Department of Justice to open a criminal investigation. “The documents and testimony show Oregon State officials misused $305 million of federal funds and improperly coordinated with former Governor John Kitzhaber’s…