Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield of Missouri in St. Louis said it stopped covering outpatient MRIs and CT scans at hospitals without prior authorization due to "enormous" price variations, St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports.
Payer
Shares of Minnetonka, Minn.-based UnitedHealth Group reached a 52-week high of $200.8 Sept. 13, according to a Nasdaq report.
Between 2015 and 2016, 14 states witnessed statistically significant increases in average deductibles for individual coverage under employer health plans, according to SHADAC, a health policy research center affiliated with Minneapolis-based University of Minnesota School of Public Health.
The following payers made headlines this week, beginning with the most recent.
Sixty-three counties nationwide are expected to lack a health insurer selling policies on the 2018 ACA exchanges as of Sept. 13, CMS said.
Advertisement
Indianapolis-based Anthem is contemplating its 2018 participation in some states' ACA marketplaces as filing deadlines approach later this month, according to a Chicago Tribune report.
The U.S. uninsured rate dropped 0.3 percentage points between 2015 and 2016 to 8.8 percent, or 28.1 million Americans, according to a U.S. Census Bureau report.
Centene Corp., a managed care and commercial payer in St. Louis, will acquire Fidelis Care, a Rego Park, N.Y.-based nonprofit managed Medicaid and Medicare plan, for $3.75 billion.
Several national health insurers pledged assistance before and in the wake of Hurricane Irma's landfall.
The five largest U.S. commercial health insurers — Aetna, Anthem, Cigna, Humana and UnitedHealth Group — were mentioned on social media and in publications 26,700 times during the last week of August, according to a talkwalker report.