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The Senate Health Committee in May 2019 released a draft bill that aims to reduce health care costs, taking particular aim at the lack of transparency in the system and the scourge of surprise medical bills.
The draft legislation is the first serious attempt at addressing the drivers behind costs in a system that is starting to see double-digit inflation again.
The heat is growing on the pharmaceutical industry after more than 40 US states filed a lawsuit accusing generic drug makers of engaging in a massive price-fixing scheme.
The lawsuit accuses 20 companies of conspiring to fix prices of more than 100 generic drugs, including some that are used to treat cancer and diabetes. The defendants include the largest producer of generic medicine in the world: Teva Pharmaceuticals.
As more people struggle with their medical bills, Congress has been introducing a raft of new legislation aimed at cutting costs and making pricing more transparent.
Retail prescription drug spending grew 36% over the four-year period ended Dec. 31, 2016, but out-of-pocket spending for health plan enrollees remained steady, according to a recent study by the Pew Charitable Trusts.
The Trump administration has issued new rules that would allow employers to provide workers with funds in health reimbursement accounts (HRAs) that can be used to purchase health insurance on the individual market.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has floated proposed regulations that would affect drug benefits for group plans and association plans and attempt to reduce drug expenses for health plan enrollees and drug plans.
While the rules seem to be focused on individual plans sold on government-run exchanges, three of the changes would also affect small and mid-sized group plans.
President Trump has signed two bills into law that would add transparency to drug pricing by banning gag clauses imposed by pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) that bar pharmacists from discussing drug prices with the person buying prescription medication.
After a period of relative stability, the future of the Affordable Care Act has once again been thrown into uncertainty.
In a surprise move, the Department of Justice announced that it would not further pursue an appeal of a ruling by U.S. District Court Judge Reed O’Connor, and instead asked the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to affirm the decision he made in December 2018.
Most employers are doing all they can to keep their employees’ health insurance and health care outlays to a minimum.
And while most of those efforts are focused on the upfront cost of insurance, co-pays and deductibles, many employers fail to help their employees control the very costs they actually have the most control over and one of those areas is medicine.
While most businesses rarely get rebate checks from their group health insurer, this year may be different as insurance companies are expected to pay back record excess premiums, as required by the Affordable Care Act.
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