Healthcare reform

Enrollment hits administration’s revised goal, while Obama calls to thank volunteers, navigators, assisters — but not brokers — for their help

As the majority of brokers working on the ACA’s exchanges rush to finish applications before the March 31 open enrollment deadline, Oregon brokers are in a different situation.

Senator Mary Landrieu (D-La.) proposed two bills Thursday enhancing brokers’ work on the ACA’s public exchanges.

The agency tasked with ACA execution would not say Wednesday whether they had a process to verify when consumers began their insurance applications on the exchanges. This comes a day after the group said there may be more time for certain individuals to finish enrolling after a March 31 deadline.

Americans are becoming less divided about the Affordable Care Act, as the gap between favorable and unfavorable views of the law has narrowed among both the general public and the uninsured, a new survey finds.

Ronnell Nolan’s HAFA has taken off in Louisiana, and now she has her sights set on major federal legislation.

Whatever the Supreme Court’s decision in Hobby Lobby’s challenge to the Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate, it won’t likely have broad implications for all employers, according to Howard Shapiro, partner and head of Proskauer’s ERISA litigation group in New Orleans.

Americans will get more time to enroll in Obamacare insurance plans if they started the process but were unable to complete it before the March 31 deadline.

Voluntary benefit sales are enjoying rapid growth as employers prepare for the impact of the Affordable Care Act by revamping their medical plan designs to include more products such as accident and critical illness benefits.

Two months before health insurers must submit rate proposals for 2015 to government regulators, WellPoint Inc. fired a surprising shot across their bow by predicting it may ask for “double-digit plus” increases.

A divided U.S. Supreme Court Tuesday debated whether companies can assert religious rights, hearing arguments in an ideological clash over the Affordable Care Act and rules that promote contraceptive coverage.

Access to prescription drugs is more challenging for consumers buying insurance through the exchanges than those covered by employer-sponsored insurance plans, an analysis by Avalere Health finds.

Obamacare opponents will argue Tuesday, to the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, that millions of otherwise qualified people in the 36 states that haven’t set up marketplaces are ineligible to receive the subsidies.

State-run exchange flaws have sparked talk of extending the open enrollment deadline beyond March 31 in states where residents could not complete applications through their respective online marketplaces.

With just days to go in open enrollment on the ACA’s public exchanges, brokers say the biggest problem is getting a hold of certain carriers, and one in particular rose to the top of the list of complaints.

Employers are making creative changes to employee benefit offerings to stem the tide of rising health care costs, but many are taking a wait-and-see approach to private exchanges, according to presenters at MetLife’s 10th National Benefits Symposium Monday.

Months after becoming the first state to offer health care coverage to lower-income residents through a “private option” rather than Medicaid expansion under the ACA, Arkansas finally agreed to extend this closely watched political compromise.

Republican leaders on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee are challenging the Treasury Department’s authority to delay the Affordable Care Act’s employer mandate, calling it a political move directed by President Obama ahead of the November elections.

Nearly four years after the enactment of the Affordable Care Act more than half (53%) of Americans disapprove of the law — but most of those opponents now say they want politicians to make the law work, according to a new Pew Research Center study.

WellPoint Inc., the second-largest for-profit health insurer in the U.S., raised its earnings forecast for the year as the company adds customers through the exchanges set up under Obamacare.