Reimbursement

California's second largest nonprofit insurer is using a strategic acquisition to enter a growing, but challenging sector of government-funded health plans.

Member self-service portals have become a must-have for healthcare payers. Members expect and demand them. Yet putting up a portal and just expecting members to use it is a fast track to failure and lost business.

Credit ratings agency Moody’s issued a negative outlook on U.S. nonprofit hospitals in 2015, as smaller hospitals continue to weaken amid changes to the industry.

Record low healthcare inflation does not seem to be trickling down to average middle income consumers with work-based insurance. If anything, more Americans may be questioning the value of their employer health plans amid wage stagnation.

No deadline is ever really certain. The federal government is giving health insurers more time to submit data for the risk-sharing programs that many market reforms are depending on.

The world of Medicare post-acute care is set to change, as a series of reforms ultimately rewrite payments in a sector that accounts for more than 20 percent of all Medicare spending. 

In a way that is deeply changing federal contracting, growth opportunities from the government have increasingly come not from war but from healing.

While some evidence suggests medical cost ratio mandates are helping make healthcare more affordable, there are still some long-term doubts. 

Amid an intense debate about the cost and value of drugs, a big payer and a big pharma company are promising to comb through their collective evidence and deliver new knowledge that may improve patient outcomes.

Here's a look at some recent headlines in the world of healthcare finance.