Health and wellness

Towers Watson has signed a web broker entity agreement with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, which supervises the health insurance exchange operated by the federal government in 36 states.

Republican governors seeking to make their states enemy territory for the ACA are facing a counteroffensive. Among the vanguard: two 74-year-old retirees walking the streets of working-class New Jersey.

The subsidy should reduce the cost of the premiums by about 32% on average for people buying the second-lowest priced plans through state-by-state insurance exchanges set to open Oct. 1, the Kaiser Family Foundation said in a report today.

Faculty and staff are protesting the program as an invasion of their privacy. What they should be protesting is the university’s wasting money on health risk appraisals, which have never been shown to reduce costs.

Oklahoma won court approval to proceed with a federal lawsuit challenging tax aspects of President Barack Obama’s health care law.

President Barack Obama urged military veterans to defend his signature health care law and press Republican lawmakers to end budget cuts that threaten future spending on benefits.

Oregon, a Democratic-led state that has embraced President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act, won’t meet all the requirements for its health insurance exchange when the online marketplace opens Oct. 1.

Before heading out until September, Congress heard testimony from top CMS and IRS officials. Find out what these testimonies said about the health care reform law, now that the insurance exchanges are less than two months away from opening.

A breakdown of the potential impact seen already from the SHOP exchange delay.

Dianne Howard, director of risk and benefits management for Florida’s Palm Beach County school district, takes EBN’s 2013 Benny Award for Benefits Leadership in Health Care.

Security testing for a new computer system underpinning the U.S. health care overhaul is behind schedule, leaving little margin for error to meet an Oct. 1 deadline, government auditors said.

In the first two years of the program, 82% of the employees of the Minnetonka, Minn.-based insurer covered by the incentive program earned rewards toward reducing their premiums.

Republican officials in Georgia, Indiana and Ohio have predicted premium increases of as much as 200% as one of the law’s chief components, online insurance marketplaces, take effect.

Shutting down the U.S. government to starve President Barack Obama’s health care system overhaul is the wrong solution pushed only by a “few extreme people” in Congress, lawmakers from both major parties said.

The first bills to threaten the navigator program were introduced last week in Congress.

Supporters and opponents of the Affordable Care Act have targeted U.S. mothers in a surge of advertising and grassroots organizing as a major piece of Obamacare readies to roll out Oct 1.

This month, Gov. Cuomo announced that health insurance plan rates that will be offered through New York’s Health Benefits Exchange have been approved. There was much made in the press about the individual market rates that will be offered in 2014 and how they are at least 50% lower than current rates. As with understanding penalties, really evaluating the exchanges takes a little deeper review of the figures.

Spurned by the National Football League, the White House is turning to a different crowd to pump up the volume on the ACA’s health insurance exchanges.

Online health insurance broker EHealth Inc. won permission from the U.S. government to enroll customers for subsidized plans offered under the federal health care law.

The top two U.S. health officials are planning multiple trips in the coming months to states led by Republicans hostile to the Affordable Care Act, seeking success there for President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul despite opposition.