Conditions are right for a "death spiral" for healthcare insurance. Bill Hammond, the Empire Center's director of healthcare policy, explains the spiral is the result of insurance pools seeing, "healthy people leave, the rates go up, the premiums go up, more healthy people leave and it becomes a vicious cycle.” Read More
Central New York's biggest Obamacare insurer expects consumers to drop health coverage in droves in 2019 when a federal mandate requiring individuals to buy insurance or pay a tax penalty is repealed. Read More
Health insurers’ rate applications for 2019, which became public late Friday, raise red flags about the condition of New York’s non-group market. Read More
Our latest scan of pending health insurance mandates identified 120 bills, an increase of 29, or almost one-third, since Mandate Watch was inaugurated in March 2017. Read More
Health coverage gains under the Affordable Care Act were concentrated where they were needed most—among lower-income groups and in the five boroughs of New York City—recently released Census Bureau data show. Read More
Now that the state budget is put to bed for another year, here is a non-comprehensive rundown of health care-related highlights and lowlights. Read More
The largest revenue-raiser in the just-completed state budget, worth $2 billion over four years, is not a tax or a fee or even a legal settlement. It takes the form of semi-voluntary “grants,” mostly to be squeezed out of a Catholic Church-affiliated health plan. Read More
Governor Cuomo’s proposal to expropriate “excess” reserves from Medicaid managed care plans would apparently target just two insurers—Fidelis Care and MetroPlus—even though their reserve levels are not unusually high. Read More