Insurance

Commentary: The employer community has made its voice clear on the Affordable Care Act’s excise tax. Legislators seem to have heard. Will it make a difference?

U.S. Sens. Dean Heller (R-Nev.) and Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) introduced legislation Thursday seeking to repeal the Affordable Care Act’s excise tax on high-cost group plans.

The share of people without health insurance in the U.S. fell to 10.4 percent last year as the Affordable Care Act’s expansion of public and private coverage programs took effect.

Commentary: Data breaches, cost transparency and telehealth rank among the Health Research Institute’s top trends plan sponsors need to pay attention to.

The public employees responsible for overseeing $600 million in contracts to build Healthcare.gov were inadequately trained, kept sloppy records, and failed to identify delays and problems that contributed to millions in cost overruns, a new government report finds.

Despite eligibility for cost-sharing reductions, more than 2 million public exchange enrollees did not select eligible plans.

Professional services company Towers Watson has agreed to acquire Brovada, a Canadian insurance technology business best known for the BrovadaOne platform, an application for integrating and automating interactions between insurers, and their agents and brokers.

In the first year of open enrollment on its private benefit exchange, brokerage Lovitt & Touché made some mistakes. But the firm won’t be repeating them, says the Phoenix-based brokerage’s senior vice president.

Broker group hopeful hotline is “first step” in making enrollment through federally-facilitated marketplace an even playing field for agents and brokers

Sun Life Financial’s acquisition of the employee benefits unit of Assurant is just the latest move in the insurer’s growth strategy for the U.S. market.