Healthcare reform

Health insurers are being asked by the U.S. government to be lenient with Obamacare customers who miss the Dec. 23 deadline for enrolling in the program or are late with their initial payment. Meanwhile, Aetna says it will not renew canceled plans.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has asked the agency’s inspector general to review the development of Healthcare.gov, among other steps, in order to take “concrete action” and prevent future issues, she announced in a Wednesday blog post.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services told contractors not to cooperate with Congress’s efforts to investigate work related to the Obamacare website, a top Republican lawmaker said.

More than 250,000 Americans selected private health insurance plans through Obamacare enrollment systems last month, better than twice as many as in October when the exchanges opened amid technology errors and outages.

Industry leaders discuss brokers’ to-dos for 2014, including technology developments and pending, unexpected competitors during a panel at Workplace Benefits Transitions.

President Barack Obama’s health agency said it has spent $319 million building an online health-insurance marketplace through October.

Lou Faiola takes relationships to a new level. From carriers to brokers to beneficiaries, his commitment to benefits is apparent to all whose lives he touches.

After speaking with the leader of Towers Watson's Exchange Solutions segment and Liazon’s CEO to understand how small and larger employers should strategically approach the private exchanges, here are the key thoughts employers of any size should consider when deciding whether to shift to a defined contribution approach to health care benefits.

The health care website’s improved performance has both U.S. political parties shifting strategies, with President Barack Obama’s team preparing a January advertising blitz and a wave of celebrity promotions to boost enrollment, allies said.

With the ACA requiring even more communications to employees, many employers might consider shifting to electronic means for all disclosure notices, but there are many rules here and employers and their advisers should be careful.

More people signed up for Obamacare health plans in the first two days of December than in all of October after the U.S. government rehabilitated its error-prone insurance-exchange website.

The federal agency in charge of exchanges is communicating with brokers about technology improvements, but brokers say they haven’t heard much of anything, yet.

President Barack Obama plans to highlight the 2010 health care law’s benefits at a White House event Tuesday that kicks off a three-week campaign to regain support for a program marred by a troubled implementation.

The Obama administration says much of the site is fixed but it’s not clear still how much of that is true.

President Barack Obama raised the stakes on his three-year-old health care overhaul Sunday, declaring that fixes to his administration’s troubled insurance exchange website make it ready to sign up 800,000 people a day.

Leaders overseeing the launch of the federal health care exchange understood the importance of technology. But they did not understand how to build technology. And that lack of intuitive understanding and respect for the nature of how technology is built led to decisions that doomed the project's launch.

Towers Watson acquired Liazon Corporation, a leader in developing and delivering private benefit exchanges for active employees, last week. Representatives of the consultancy believe that this acquisition, which follows the purchase of Extend Health in June 2012, has solidified their position as the leading player in the private exchange market through its OneExchange solution.

Republican senators introduced a bill this week that would prevent the exclusion of multi-employer health plans from a $63 reinsurance fee that the ACA imposes on each enrollee.

Kansas, North Dakota and other state insurance commissioners snubbed a meeting with President Barack Obama set up to discuss allowing some people to keep medical plans that don’t meet the requirements of the U.S. health law.

A public employer in California is building its own marketplace to mirror public exchanges under the Affordable Care Act — a potential idea for brokers for prospecting.