Health Care Delivery

In an effort to control insurance premium costs, major insurance companies in California are limiting the number of doctors and hospitals that will be available to patients obtaining health plans in the new state health insurance marketplace.

At least one company's doubts about the reform effort have led to their departure from the new navigator program intended to assist the uninsured in obtaining health plans through the federal health exchange.

Republican lawmakers have failed in dozens of attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, but a new poll shows just how difficult they have made it for President Obama's signature legislative achievement to succeed.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act saved consumers $1.7 billion on health insurance premiums last year, an HHS report found. Meanwhile, a separate study found that ACA provisions squeezed insurers' profits.

Gov. Corbett is considering an expansion of Medicaid to cover hundreds of thousands of uninsured residents if he can also win significant changes to the existing part of the entitlement program, which otherwise would continue in its current form.

The expansion of Medicaid may drastically change the demographics of beneficiaries.

Even if the employer mandate will not be enforced until 2015, the US Treasury Department is still looking at ways to simplify the healthcare reporting process for employers and insurance companies.

Coping with advanced cancer, Bev Veals was in the hospital for chemo this summer when she got a call that her health plan was shutting down. Then, the substitute insurance she was offered wanted her to pay up to $3,125, on top of premiums.

The health law is expected to change the face of Medicaid literally.

The decision of some states not to expand Medicaid means that the nation's poorest - those the Affordable Care Act would have helped the most - may not receive any help at all.

Officials overseeing Delaware's implementation of the federal health care reform law still don't know what residents will pay for health care coverage under a new state health insurance exchange.

While health law reform and expansion of insurance coverage comes with good intentions, there are many other decisions that are seemingly shifting care in the opposite direction.

The Republican-led Michigan House gave final approval on Tuesday to a bill that would expand the Medicaid health program for the poor under Democratic President Barack Obama's healthcare reform law.

Medicine is unique in being the one profession that never teaches even its recruits how they, or the services they deliver, are paid and importantly, by whom.

Premium rates for health plan policies in the health insurance exchange (HIE) are expected to vary nationally, but they aren't likely to skyrocket - at least according to one research group.

Fearing Obamacare will drastically increase the cost of health insurance policies next year, some employers are turning to new strategies to blunt or at least delay the "rate shock."

As insurers prepare to implement a law designed to make health coverage affordable, insurance rates are dramatically increasing.

Hospitals, nurses, doctors and other medical providers urged New Hampshire on Tuesday to expand Medicaid to an estimated 49,000 poor adults under the federal health care overhaul law.

The U.S. health care bureaucracy is expanding; both dramatically (e.g. the implementation of the Affordable Care Act) and gradually. A recent decision proposed by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) exemplifies the dangers to medical innovation and patients represented by the gradual expansion of the health care bureaucracy.

The Obama administration has delayed a step crucial to the launch of the new healthcare law, the signing of final agreements with insurance plans to be sold on federal health insurance exchanges starting October 1.

Debated and despised, the Medicare physician payment formula may finally be on the way out at least that's what AMA President Ardis Hoven believes.

Amitabh Chandra, PhD, says health reform affects patient-centered diabetes care through two different interventions.

As healthcare costs rise in Florida, insurers and hospitals vested in the success of the Affordable Care Act, are coming up with new ways to cut costs from buying services in bulk and piloting programs to lowering hospital readmission rates and limiting the number of doctors within a plan's network.

Susan Dentzer, senior policy adviser, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, says there are many trends that are transforming today's health insurance marketplace.

Only 6 states across the country are currently receiving funds through the Affordable Care Act (ACA) provision intended to increase Medicaid managed-care payments to meet Medicare payment levels.

Tomas Philipson, PhD, says historical reform efforts in the United States have raised doubts as to whether or not the implementation of the Affordable Care Act will slow health spending growth. Dr Philipson also suggests that concepts of value-based insurance design must be considered differently when managing a chronic condition like diabetes.

As congressional Republicans push for a delay in the 2010 health law's individual mandate, the Obama administration Tuesday announced final regulations implementing the requirement that most Americans have health insurance coverage by Jan. 1 or pay a fine.

As American workers prepare for the first open enrollment season of the Obamacare era, hints are surfacing about what awaits them - higher deductibles, more incentives for staying well and premium hikes that continue to out-strip wages, albeit by more moderate amounts than in the past.

Facing anticipated reductions in funding and regulatory changes under the health care reform law, several of the nation's largest health insurers have indicated plans to scale back their Medicare Advantage programs.

They are bare-bones health plans, and critics say they could leave consumers who become seriously ill on the hook for tens of thousands of dollars in medical costs.