Brian M. Kalish

Republican members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee have sent letters to every insurer participating in the federal marketplace to request specific enrollment data, including how many people have paid their first month’s premium, how many individuals were previously uninsured and how many plans received a subsidy.

The Department of Health and Human Services Office of the Inspector General is opening an investigation into Maryland’s state-run health insurance marketplace, amid questions over spending on a still not fully-functioning website.

Small and mid-size employers will turn to private exchanges in the very near future, predicted a speaker Friday at an America’s Health Insurance Plans conference in Washington, and that will change the game once again for small and mid-size brokerages.

U.S. Health Insurance Regulator Gary Cohen has long wanted to return home to California, and the end of open enrollment seemed like the perfect time to make that move, he told the media Thursday, two days after announcing his resignation.

Looking toward the end of 2014 open enrollment in the Affordable Care Act’s health exchanges, Gary Cohen, director of the Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight, said Thursday at an AHIP conference that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services is expecting a “fairly significant spike in enrollments."

A new study from PricewaterhouseCoopers finds consumers are a lot less focused on the price of their plan than insurance executives believe them to be.

More than 820,000 people have selected a Covered California health insurance plan through the Golden State’s public marketplace through the first two weeks of February, exceeding the state’s open enrollment goal through March 31 of 700,000 enrollees for 2014, officials said Wednesday.

In-house branding increases program utilization; helps close the sale

Employees fear the financial impact of a critical illness more than dying from one. Take advantage of the growing popularity of this voluntary benefit today.

Despite fixes made to the health insurance marketplaces, two-thirds of Americans (66%) surveyed in mid-January still say the opening has “not gone well” or worse, according to a new Associated Press-GfK survey.

More than half of Americans do not know the date by which they must purchase health insurance to comply with the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate provision, according to a Bankrate.com survey.

Through strategic partnerships, small brokerages can compete on a national level.

CMS accelerated $90 million deal, rather than go through normal one-year bidding process, as it did not believe current contractor could complete work on ‘urgently needed’ functionalities.

Outcomes tracking and easy access are contributing to the rise of the employee assistance program. But your clients need you to spread the word.

Despite assurances from the Department of Health and Human Services that Healthcare.gov is secure, Committee on Oversight & Government Reform Chairman Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calf.) said Thursday that we “must assume that website is still vulnerable and Americans may have [personally identifiable information] hacked and taken.”

The back-end payment system of Healthcare.gov is still being built, a senior Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services official said Thursday in testimony on Capitol Hill.

The committee released its findings ahead of a Friday House vote on Republican-sponsored H.R. 3811, the Health Exchange Security and Transparency Act, which would require that the Department of Health and Human Services notify individuals within two days of a known security breach of the Healthcare.gov website.

Despite increased traffic to health exchange websites, more than half (59%) of uninsured Americans say their experience with them was negative, compared to just 39% who report a positive experience, according to Gallup.

Learning curve for exchange-traded funds is steep, yet interest grows

High enrollment numbers increase phone hold times on state exchanges, as computer enrollment keeps pace