Payer

Jersey City, N.J.-based CarePoint Health and Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield resolved a more than 2-year-old contract dispute and $76 million lawsuit over billing in late August, NJ Spotlight reports.

The following payers made headlines this week, beginning with the most recent.

Baltimore-based CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield renewed its pharmacy benefits management agreement with CVS Caremark, the PBM arm of CVS Health in Woonsocket, R.I.

Norfolk, Va.-based Optima Health will reduce its individual marketplace footprint next year in Virginia, a move possibly leaving 70,000 enrollees without coverage.

Indianapolis-based Anthem said Wednesday it will scale back where it sells its individual marketplace polices to 59 of Kentucky's 120 counties next year, according to a CNBC report.

Individual marketplace health plans with narrow hospital and physician networks offered premiums 16 percent less expensive than plans with broad networks, according to a recent study published in Health Affairs.

Baltimore-based Evergreen Health, one of 23 nonprofit health plans created under the ACA, will be liquidated by the end of September, The Baltimore Sun reports.

Indianapolis-based Anthem continued its 2018 exchange rollback in Missouri where it will pull its individual products from 17 counties, including the city of St. Louis, according to a St. Louis Post-Dispatch report.

Thirty-nine percent of millennials believe it is important an employer offers life insurance, even though the majority plan to marry, have a family and purchase a home one day, a recent Anthem survey found.

All five major commercial payers saw their stock prices rise last week.