Health and wellness

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services is in the early stages of looking at new vendors to potentially take over operation of Healthcare.gov, when Accenture’s contract expires in January 2015.

Employees are craving voluntary benefits to offset high deductible plans, yet many say they haven’t been offered any new options since the ACA became law.

As Covered California announces the rate at which agents enrolled consumers on the state-run public exchange, two different realities are emerging from agents throughout the most populous U.S. state.

Nearly half of newly insured Americans signed up for coverage off the ACA’s public marketplaces and benefit advisers have several theories as to why.

Brokers may be the best intermediary to communicate a matter of pediatric dental compliance to employers and medical carriers operating in numerous states as regulations shift.

Consumer spending climbed by $20.4 billion at an annualized rate adjusted for inflation in February, and $13 billion of the increase came from outlays on health services spurred by the ACA, according to Commerce Department data.

People who waited until the last minute to sign up for Obamacare were significantly younger than those first in line, as the percentage of enrollees younger than 35 jumped in the last month. President Obama said Thursday that 8 million people have enrolled in private insurance plans through the public exchanges.

With open enrollment officially over, suggestions are emerging from industry experts on how to tweak the next round of ACA sign-ups.

Tuesday was the last day of a two-week health law extension for hundreds of thousands of people who couldn’t finish their enrollment by March 31, the official deadline to sign up for a federally subsidized insurance plan in 2014.

It’s no surprise Americans are tired. That’s why benefit advisers working with employers to build a wellness program should not ignore sleep solutions.

The Congressional Budget Office, the main arbiter of Obamacare’s effects on the economy, left unchanged its estimate of the number of people expected to gain insurance coverage under the law.

Advisers say employers are increasingly purchasing voluntary dental plans as an effort to cut costs, meet new ACA requirements and retain employees.

Benefit advisers are hopeful Sylvia Mathews Burwell will repair strained communications between industry and HHS, while others view her nomination as largely a political move designed to push Obama’s divisive health care reform agenda.

Many wellness models are based on mythology. Myths like all plans should have disease management, or everyone needs to work on heart disease prevention. How to get past the noise and on to effective interventions? Look closely at your own group – its people, its illnesses, and its work environment.

With the departure of the HHS secretary comes an opportunity for brokers and agents to have their voices heard by a new leader as they continue to assist consumers with the ACA’s exchanges.

Commentary: Columnist Craig Davidson questions whether this was a true resignation or was she a "sacrificial lamb?"

Commentary: Sebelius was in an “unwinnable position," according to the former head of sales and marketing at Covered California, Michael Lujan. The former insurance agent writes that more engagement with the benefits industry would have behooved the troubled health secretary.

Kathleen Sebelius, the U.S. health secretary who steered the troubled rollout of President Barack Obama’s signature health care law, will resign just as the program topped its first-year enrollment goal, according to two people familiar with the decision.

Legal analysis: Are employees hired through a staffing firm or professional employer organization considered full-time employees under the ACA? Answering this question wrong could cost your clients a great deal.

About 400,000 people signed up for private health insurance under Obamacare since a deadline passed that was initially supposed to end enrollment, the U.S. health secretary said Thursday.