Monona-based WPS Health Insurance is ending its Medicare Part D drug coverage next year, requiring about 11,000 enrollees in Wisconsin to find other plans. WPS is dropping the prescription drug plan, which it has offered since the government added drug coverage as a Medicare option in 2006, so it can concentrate on its Medicare Supplement Insurance plans, spokesperson DeAnne Boegli said.
A prescription middleman on Friday confirmed that it has promised to pay Ohio $15 million to settle fraud claims against it. When the state announced the deal two days earlier, the company denied it had been finalized.
Colorado’s health insurance plan is taking steps toward changing how it pays for state employees’ health care, in a test of whether market-based solutions can deliver results. State employees have a choice of two health plans, run by Kaiser Permanente and Cigna. The state is trying something new with the Cigna plan.
For 23 years, the private ambulance industry in California had gone without an increase in the base rate the state pays it to transport Medicaid enrollees. At the start of the year, it asked the state legislature to more than triple the rate, from around $110 to $350 per ride. The request went unheeded.
A week after the D.C. Council awarded multibillion-dollar contracts for insuring D.C.’s Medicaid patients to three insurers, seeming to finally end a years-long struggle to right the city’s Medicaid system after court and council fights, Mayor Muriel E. Bowser has called for a new ethics investigation related to the recently completed procurement.
