The project, put out to bid in 2007 and still far from completion, was finally put to rest on Monday when the state Department of Health Care Services announced a legal settlement with Xerox Corp., the project contractor, under which Xerox will pay the state approximately $120 million.
The Affordable Care Act suffered another jolt late last week with the news that UnitedHealth Group, the nation’s largest health insurer, was making good on its threat to pull out of Obamacare, beginning with its operations in Georgia and Arkansas.
To little fanfare and virtually no media coverage, the Congressional Budget Office sharply downgraded its forecast for ObamaCare in its latest report, issued in late March. By just about every measure, things are looking worse than they did a year ago.
Both regulators responsible for reviewing insurance mergers in California have now approved Centene Corp.’s $6.8 billion acquisition of Health Net, allowing the controversial deal to move forward.
The Brown administration this week formally asked the U.S. government to sign off on a revamped tax on health plans that has the primary goal of continuing to pull in more than $1 billion in federal money.
Blue Shield of California, one of the state’s biggest health plans, has eliminated up to 460 jobs, including about 300 in Sacramento and the Central Valley, more than 70 in Southern California, and close to 80 in its San Francisco headquarters office and other Bay Area outposts.
California lawmakers approved a health plan tax package Monday designed to continue pulling in more than a billion dollars in matching federal money, while committing several hundred million dollars to services for the developmentally disabled, debt relief and other programs.
If Medi-Cal were a state of its own, it would be the nation’s seventh-biggest by population; its $91-billion budget would be the country’s fourth-largest, trailing only those of California, New York and Texas. . . The question California officials now face is how — and on days with a gloomier economic outlook, if — the massive health program can be sustained.
A recent analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that more than seven million people who are eligible for exchange coverage would pay less in penalties than for the least expensive insurance available to them. More than half would not qualify for subsidies, the analysis found.
For years, the state has conducted something of a shell game to help finance Medi-Cal, its health insurance system for the poor that now covers nearly a third of Californians.
Following a series of meetings, proponents of the various tax-extension proposals say they are exploring a compromise that would raise money into a special fund to pay for schools and colleges as well as healthcare programs. Involved in the talks are the Service Employees International Union, California Teachers Association, California Hospital Association and the California Medical Association.
The average annual cost of an employer family plan rose 4%, to $17,545, from $16,834 last year, according to the annual poll of employers performed by the nonprofit Kaiser Family Foundation along with the Health Research & Educational Trust, a nonprofit affiliated with the American Hospital Association. The share of the 2015 family-plan premium borne by employees was 29% of the total, the same percentage as last year.
Health care spending will outpace the nation’s overall economic growth over the next decade, the government forecast on Tuesday, highlighting a challenge for the next president, not to mention taxpayers, businesses and individual Americans.
Medi-Cal has expanded rapidly in recent years, largely due to California’s successful implementation of federal health care reform, and the program now provides affordable health care coverage to more than 12 million Californians with low or moderate incomes. The following discussion provides a more accurate and balanced perspective on the impact — and significance — of rising Medi-Cal enrollment under health care reform, a process that began with the passage of the federal Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) in 2010 and fully took effect in California in 2014.
People who work for cities, counties, school districts and other public agencies in the four-county Sacramento region face an average HMO premium increase next year of 12.2 percent. Amounts vary by health plan from a low of 5.17 percent for Kaiser Permanente to 18.76 percent for the Blue Shield NetValue plan. Anthem Blue Cross charges more here than in any other region, including the Bay Area.