News
Health Insurers: The Other Half of the Consolidation Story
27+ min ago (174+ words) Thanks for reading HEALTH CARE un-covered! This post is public so feel free to share it. We find that insurers are even more consolidated than previously reported by the American Medical Association (AMA). Yet the market power of insurers, in…...
Federal Fraud Watchdog Documents How Medicare Advantage Fails People When They Are Most Vulnerable
3+ day, 6+ hour ago (635+ words) When my mother broke her hip, I watched a Medicare Advantage plan try to cut her recovery short. I knew enough from my years in the industry to fight back " and eventually I got her out of that plan entirely…...
The Margin Myth: Why One of the Insurance Industry's Favorite Talking Points is Designed to Mislead You
5+ day, 4+ hour ago (686+ words) When United Health Group reported its first-quarter 2026 results, it disclosed something that didn't make many headlines: an annualized return on equity of 26. 2%. That number " not the profit or operating margin " is what Wall Street uses to evaluate whether a business…...
Government Watchdog Agency Finds that Every High-Risk Acute Stroke Diagnosis Submitted by Medicare Advantage Insurers in Audit Was Upcoded
1+ week, 5+ day ago (655+ words) HEALTH CARE un-covered Government Watchdog Agency Finds that Every High-Risk Acute Stroke Diagnosis Submitted by Medicare Advantage Insurers in Audit Was Upcoded A new federal audit found Medicare Advantage insurers received hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars for stroke diagnoses…...
The Health Insurance CEO Preaching Accountability " While Evading It
3+ week, 4+ day ago (407+ words) Paul Markovich, CEO of the parent company of Blue Shield of California, where I worked for a dozen years, has a message for everyone who supports reforming health care to put people over profits: he's our champion. In a campaign-style…...
The Convenient Narrative Letting Insurers Off the Hook
1+ mon, 1+ week ago (784+ words) Zack Cooper argued this week in The New York Times that Americans may be blaming the wrong culprit for rising premiums. In his view, the bigger driver is hospital market power'fueled by years of consolidation that policymakers have done little…...
Cigna's "Transparency Report" is Just a PR Stunt
1+ mon, 2+ week ago (664+ words) On the morning of December 4, 2024, Brian Thompson, the CEO of United Healthcare, was shot and killed outside a Manhattan hotel. What happened next stunned the health insurance industry " and, I suspect, haunts its communications teams to this day. The pledges…...
Norm Spier on HEALTH CARE un-covered
1+ mon, 3+ week ago (995+ words) I have to chime in, probably not that relevant to the point made in the post, that at least KFF (the Kaiser Family Foundation) provides lots of good information on health care and health insurance and the ACA, etc. (BTW,…...
I Helped Sell HSAs. They're a Bad Deal.
2+ mon, 5+ hour ago (760+ words) When I was Cigna's communications chief, one of the ideas I had to sell the hardest was that high-deductible health plans tied to health savings accounts would fix the U. S. health care system once and for all by giving Americans the…...
Introducing The Health Insurance Influence Tracker
2+ mon, 1+ day ago (175+ words) Today, the Center for Health and Democracy Education Fund is launching a new tool, the Health Insurance Influence Tracker, as part of our ongoing work examining how giant health insurers have skewed the U. S. health care system away from working people…...