Healthcare plans

The program, available to self-insured employers, offers some diabetes supplies and diabetes-related prescription drugs at no charge, as well as no copays for related doctor visits, at an estimated savings of up to $500 a year for participants.

Freestanding ERs are among the fastest-growing areas of medical care, but many say the facility fees charged by them aren’t justified and lack transparency. Hospitals contend the facilities drain away the privately insured, high-paying patients they need to survive.

Consumers and some health insurers, led by Aetna, Inc., say the facility fees charged by many of the new ERs aren’t justified and lack transparency.

NBC Universal’s medical director voices concern about the lack of education for high-deductible health plans, particularly as exchanges come online.

Representatives from private health insurance exchanges assert that exchanges are hitting the ground running and that they are well-equipped to help employers meet the diverse health needs of employees.

One study yields mixed results on telemedicine, finding that physician e-visits are cheaper but result in more prescriptions.

Eighty-three percent of 800 large and mid-size American employers — representing more than 7 million workers — now use some form of incentive to get employees more aware of their health status, Aon Hewitt polls show.

Humana Inc. and UnitedHealth Group Inc. rose after congressional researchers said the U.S. Medicare program has the authority to raise payments to insurers.

Targeting specific demographics will be critical to 2013 open enrollment communications, says Univers’ Dani McCauley. McCauley tells EBN that employers will face a challenging landscape this year communicating health care reform and other benefits changes.

Communicating ahead of open enrollment is both a broader and a more specific challenge in a post-health care reform world. One expert at Univers talks about how she is prepping her clients and tips for how employers should plan.

New legislation was issued last night in the Senate that would remove broker compensation from the MLR calculation.

The report card, developed by Catalyst for Payment Reform and the Health Care Incentives Improvement Initiative (HCI³), examined multiple transparency factors on a 100-point scale.

Consumer-driven health plans are not achieving long-term savings greater than what would be reached by raising the deductible on traditional PPOs, according to the 2012 UBA Health Plan Survey.

In a legislative session sponsored by the Society for Human Resource Management, benefits attorney Elizabeth Vollmar covered everything from in-house administration functions to avoiding financial exposure.

A federal judge has issued a preliminary injunction on PPACA’s contraception requirement, saying an employer’s First Amendment rights could be irreparably harmed if the mandate was enforced while a lawsuit was pending.

Under current guidance, “affordable” health care coverage for a family could get unaffordable fairly quickly, but is total household income even an issue for employers?

The increased accounts and balances were expected in a recent EBRI/MGA survey, but other analysts’ predictions are being confounded. For example, no real correlation was found between account balance and healthy behaviors.

The insurance industry is not very prepared for climate change, according to “Insurer Climate Risk Disclosure Survey: 2012 Findings & recommendations,” from the Ceres Coalition.

Nearly half of all health plan members in the group and individual markets nationwide say they are interested in using a state exchange to purchase health insurance, according to a new survey by J.D. Power and Associates.

While experts once predicted savings of as much as $81 billion a year from electronic records, U.S. health care spending has continued to increase, partly because of systems that don’t share information, they say.