Payer

Durham-based Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina requested a 22.9 percent average rate increase for health plans it sells on the ACA exchange.

Bloomfield, Conn.-based Cigna will distribute a one-time award of five stocks to each of its more than 40,000 employees and expand its paid leave.

Eden Prairie, Minn.-based Optum, the health services platform of Minnetonka, Minn.-based UnitedHealth Group, entered a multiyear agreement with Merck to link prescription drug reimbursement to patient outcomes.

Roughly one-sixth of elderly or ill Americans could face "extremely high premiums" under the House-approved American Health Care Act, according to the Congressional Budget Office's score of the bill released Wednesday.

Chicago-based Health Care Service Corp., the umbrella organization of Blue Cross and Blue Shield companies in five states, reported a $1.3 billion year-over-year increase in profit in the first quarter of 2017, Axios reports.

Memphis, Tenn.-based Saint Francis Healthcare and Louisville, Ky.-based Humana inked a provider network agreement after going out of network with each other in October, according to a Memphis Business Journal report.

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

Here are four insurers planning to exit the ACA marketplace in 2018, as reported by Becker's Hospital Review.

As the Senate reviews the Congressional Budget Office's score of the American Health Care Act, Joseph Swedish, CEO of Indianapolis-based Anthem, said he expects the Senate bill to look like "a repair more than a repeal and replace," according to…

A new HHS analysis found individual health plan premiums have doubled since 2013, the year before various market reforms were enacted under the ACA.