Minnesota lawmakers clash over recommendations from health insurance exchange advisory task force

Legislators are clashing in Minnesota over recommendations regarding a health insurance exchange program. The recommendations come from a task force that had been commissioned by Governor Mark Dayton. The task force’s goal was to determine the necessity of a health insurance exchange program for the state. According to the group’s recommendations, the program would bring significant benefits to residents and could help improve the economy of the state, which is why the task force is now supporting plans to build and exchange. The task force was comprised of some of…

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Texas health insurance waiver denied by the federal government

The federal government has announced that it has not approved Texas’s request for exclusion from a new law that places limitations on allowable amount of overhead spending by health insurers. The law from which Texas wanted to be excluded is one of the changes made in 2010 as a part of the Affordable Care Act for federal health care. Officials in Texas are claiming that this part of the Act is unconstitutional. It is called the medical loss ratio requirement, and it states that health insurance companies must spend a…

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Americans speculate regarding the outcome of the Supreme Court’s decision regarding the health care reforms

According to a poll performed by the Kaiser Family Foundation, the majority of people in the United States believe that the Supreme court will rule against the law at the center of the health care reform that would require Americans to purchase health insurance, and that it will deem this law to be unconstitutional. Slightly less than one third of Americans believe that the Affordable Care Act provision of the healthcare overhaul will be upheld by the Supreme Court. When the participants in the poll were asked whether or not…

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HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius appears on the Daily Show to talk health care reform

Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, has embarked on a nationwide tour to help promote health care reform. Her first stop was the Daily Show with Jon Stewart on Monday night. The issue of reform has been one steeped in controversy since the passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010. Consumers are leery of the changes being made to the health care system and those coming to the insurance industry. Sebelius suggests that this may be due to misinformation or misconceptions of the reform…

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Wisconsin to return federal money meant for insurance exchange

Governor awaits the fate of the Affordable Care Act to continue work on the project – Wisconsin decided this week to return federal money that would have helped the state establish its own health insurance exchange. The state had been given more than $38 million in federal grants for the project last year. Since then, legislators have been working on how to establish and exchange and whether or not one would actually exist in the state. Governor Scott Walker has been an opponent of the federal Affordable Care Act, the…

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