The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is suing UnitedHealthcare over allegations the company discriminated against a fully remote employee by refusing to grant her a religious exemption from the company's COVID-19 vaccination requirement. 

Some payer CEOs are feeling optimistic about the future of marketplace insurance. 

Virginia reinstated around 45,000 people improperly removed from its Medicaid program, the Richmond Times-Dispatch reported Sept. 20. 

There have been rumblings in Mississippi recently about putting up the concept of Medicaid expansion for open debate in a state where current Gov. Tate Reeves has repeatedly ruled such a policy out.

Cigna is negotiating contracts with health systems for 2024 and adding new benefits and international plan options. 

Payers have been subject to price transparency regulations since July 2022, but no comprehensive action or research has taken place since then to assess compliance, according to research published Sept. 19 in Health Affairs.

CMS is auditing Texas HHS to ensure the state is complying with federal requirements amid the Medicaid redeterminations process, the Austin American-Statesman reported Sept. 20.

From UnitedHealth's plans to move its corporate offices to Optum's campus, to a judge denying Prisma's Health's temporary restraining order request against UnitedHealthcare, here are nine headlines about UnitedHealth Group Becker's has reported since Sept. 8. 

Salt Lake City-based Select Health, the non-profit insurance subsidiary of Intermountain Health, is partnering with Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Co. to bring lower cost medication offerings to its members. 

More than 85 percent of the nearly 650,000 Medicare TV ad airings over a nine-week stretch during the 2023 open enrollment period were for Medicare Advantage, according to a Sept. 20 report from KFF.

Around 1 in 5 adults with Medicare reported high healthcare costs in the last year, qualifying them as underinsured, according to a survey from the Commonwealth Fund. 

There's a lack of commercial coverage for digital healthcare services compared to publicly-funded health plans, which is limiting access to care for more than half of the U.S. population, according to new research published by the AMA on Sept. 19.

Elevance Health's pharmacy benefit manager, CarelonRx, is launching a new integrated cost savings program to automatically offer members the lowest price for generic prescription drugs while at their preferred pharmacy.

Bright Health owes CMS $380 million in risk adjustment payments from its shuttered insurance business, the company said Sept. 19. 

Medicare Advantage beneficiaries with Alzheimer's disease and related dementia are 1.4 times more likely to switch to traditional Medicare than their counterparts without the disease, a study published Sept. 15 in JAMA Health Forum found. 

Former Cigna employee Jonathan Ferrie will pay more than $33,000 to settle insider trading allegations from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. 

Greater access to care and making such care more affordable may be on the horizon for lower-income older adults and people with disabilities after the Department of Health and Human Services and CMS finalized a rule to streamline enrollment in the Medicare Savings Programs. The move was described in a Sept. 18 news release as the most significant HHS action in a decade for such care.

North Carolina lawmakers are proposing tying funding to expand the state's Medicaid program to a bill approving four new casinos in the state, the News and Observer reported Sept. 18. 

Aetna has filed to offer individual health plans on the Maryland ACA exchange in 2024.

New York's Medicaid program paid $388 million for medical services between 2016 and 2022 that should have been paid by federally-funded plans such as Medicare, according to two audits from the state's comptroller published Sept. 14.