HealthPartners creating new health plan in IA

Yet another Minnesota health insurer is sizing up growth in Iowa. HealthPartners announced Tuesday that it is working with a Des Moines-based hospital system to create a new health insurance company to sell Medicare health plans for 2017 in Iowa and Illinois. The new insurance company will be equally owned and governed by UnityPoint Health, which operates hospitals and clinics in Illinois, Iowa and Wisconsin, and Bloomington-based HealthPartners, which sells insurance across the state and runs hospitals and clinics in the Twin Cities. Earlier this year, Medica and UnitedHealth Group announced plans to start selling individual policies for 2016 through the government-run health insurance exchange in the Hawkeye state.