Illinois To Start Program To Boost Retirement Savings

Iowa insurance officials say 38,000 Iowans who bought health insurance policies after the Affordable Care Act was passed into law but before the state insurance exchanges were set up in 2014 will get to keep those polices for another year. These so-called transitional plans have been allowed to continue each year since the ACA, known as Obamacare, was implemented.

Investment bank Morgan Stanley’s profit hit an all-time high at the start of 2018 as rising concerns about a trade war between the world’s two-largest economies fueled growth in its markets businesses. Stock-trading revenue at the New York- based company rose 27 percent to $2.56 billion, while bond-trading climbed 9 percent to $1.88 billion.

Despite an better economy, low- and middle-income households are struggling more to keep up with rising rents and other basics.

Congress, awakened by the torrent of floods and hurricanes in 2017, is now looking at legislation that would update local flood maps and help the Federal Emergency Management Agency manage future floods. The bipartisan Flood Mapping Modernization and Homeowner Empowerment Pilot Program Act of 2018, introduced Wednesday in the House and Senate, would…

Other states are pursuing efforts to expand competition on the Obamacare exchanges, and a handful want to bring back the requirement that everyone has insurance, which was repealed in Congress’ tax legislation. Some states were moved to act after Congress failed to pass a major stabilization effort that would have injected billions of dollars into propping…

The Federal Emergency Management Agency has agreed to extend by three years the deadline for Hurricane Sandy homeowners to compete projects designed to protect their properties against future storms. Known as Increased Cost of Compliance funds, the federal government provided up to $30,000 for homeowners to make improvements such as elevating their…

Goldman booked $10 billion in revenue for the quarter, its highest total in three years and a 25 percent increase over the same period in 2017. It reported profits of $2.8 billion, compared with $2.3 billion a year earlier. The stock market’ s roller-coaster ride in the year’ s first quarter enlivened Wall Street.

A Florida lawyer has been sentenced to more than a year in prison for his role in a $23 million auto insurance fraud case involving chiropractors’ clinics. The SunSentinel reports 55-year-old Jason Dalley wept in a Fort Lauderdale courtroom Monday as a judge sentenced him to spend a year and nine months in prison and pay more than $1.8 million in restitution. Court records show the fraud ring brought in at least $23 million.

Byline: Serena Gordon, HealthDay Reporter. FRIDAY, April 6, 2018– Having a chronic heart condition is stressful enough, but new research suggests the cost of caring for the condition is also a huge financial burden for poorer families in the United States. He’s a cardiology research fellow at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas.

Amazon has shelved plans to sell and distribute pharmaceutical products through Amazon Business, its marketplace for business customers.
The biggest challenges include complexities around selling in bulk to large hospitals and building a logistics network.

April 16– Nationwide’s use of agents who exclusively sell the insurer’s products is coming to an end. The change becomes effective July 1, 2020. For the affected agents, the change puts them in position where they can work with other insurance companies and expand product offerings, said Mark Berven, president and chief operating officer of Nationwide Property&…

April 06– Two hurricanes and California wildfires took a toll on Nationwide’s 2017 financial results. The Columbus- based insurer reported Thursday an operating profit of $562 million this past year, down from $910 million in 2016 and $1.2 billion in 2015.. And this past fall, Nationwide paid $1.4 billion in losses from wildfires that hit California.

A new study finds that the opioid crisis is hurting employers as spending for addiction services and overdoses jumped nearly 1,000% in just 12 years. More than half of that spending was directed toward an employee’s child.

The government claims Shayne Kniss helped himself to more than $500,000 of his investors’ money. Kniss, 42, who operated Iris Capital Management Group, raised about $4.3 million from 47 investors from 2011 to 2014, according to court documents. But Iris, as first reported by The Oregonian/ OregonLive in February 2016, was a disaster.

It has also expanded the network of human financial advisers who support clients of its Merrill Edge program, a mashup of robo-advisory and human help. “It takes what has historically been a lot of investment language and jargon and makes it into a much simpler, almost storybook way for an investor to dig into and research a company,” said Aron Levine, head of Merrill…

Susan Collins of Maine said Wednesday that she is “not very optimistic” that fixes to Obamacare will be taken up this year, according to a report in the Portland Press Herald. Collins had orchestrated an agreement with Senate Republican leaders to add billions of dollars in funding to the Obamacare exchanges where people buy government subsidized health…

Morgan Stanley said Tuesday that it had fired a star financial adviser who has been accused by multiple former wives and girlfriends of physical abuse and stalking. The New York Times reported last week that Morgan Stanley executives for years had known about the allegations against the financial adviser, Douglas E. Greenberg. The Wall Street firm placed Mr….

Physician offices spend a lot of money on billing costs, and a new study finds they deal with $11 billion in challenged revenue annually from insurers. However, that number could be as high as $54 billion, according to the study that examined the complexity of billing and paying for physician care.

More Americans are afraid of paying for their healthcare than becoming seriously ill, according to a new poll conducted by researchers at the University of Chicago and West Health Institute. Nearly one-third of respondents said they had to choose between paying for a medical bill and food or heat.

The merger of Albertsons Cos. and Rite Aid Corp. took another step forward with the expiration of the Hart-Scott-Rodino waiting period for the $24 billion deal. Pending approval of Rite Aid shareholders, regulatory clearance and other customary closing conditions, the transaction is expected to close early in the second half of 2018. Most Albertsons Cos….

Our society has lost most of our previously taboo subjects. Sex, for instance, used to be a major taboo, but no longer, at least in the public arena. Sexual harassment and abuse prompted recent firings of prominent figures in politics, entertainment and business.

As many as 10,000 Maine residents are struggling to afford health care coverage due to rising premiums and deductibles. The Portland Press Herald reports former President Obama’s Affordable Care Act lacks cost control for enrollees who earn more than 400 percent of the federal poverty limit. As a result, some enrollees have seen premiums increase as much as 110 percent from $376 per month in 2014 to $790 per month this year.

Bank of America’ s Merrill Edge investing platform, which includes discount brokerage services, managed investment portfolios and access to financial advisors, laid out significant expansion plans on Thursday. Merrill Edge, which has garnered more than 2.4 million accounts and $184.5 billion in assets since its 2010 launch, expects to hire 300 Financial…

Research company Gallup has recently found that US citizens are more concerned about healthcare than any other issue the country is presently facing. It is no surprise with President Trump’s endeavour to remove Obamacare, which increased concerns for many low-income families and those with complex healthcare needs. The survey has highlighted that…

The broad U.S. stock market is down about 10% from its January high. And that puts it a far ways off from a bear market, or a drop of 20% or more.

Kindred Healthcare is moving forward with a deal to be acquired by Humana and two private equity firms following a court ruling that denied a request for a preliminary injunction by a top shareholder. Brigade Capital, which brought the lawsuit, is urging shareholders to deny the deal.

Congress has not managed to make widespread statutory changes to the Affordable Care Act due to partisan squabbles that sank measures to stabilize the marketplace and intraparty fights that prevented GOP lawmakers from repealing the system altogether.. The combination of these two actions will drive premium rates up by 18.3 percent in 2019, according to…

When the topic of estate planning comes up, talk about taxes is soon to follow. According to a recent TD Wealth survey of 109 attendees of the 52nd Annual Heckerling Institute on Estate Planning, including attorneys, trust officers, accountants, charitable giving professionals, insurance advisors, elder law specialists, wealth management professionals,…

The owner of a compounding pharmacy who pleaded guilty to plotting to defraud a federal health insurance program out of more than $10 million has been sentenced to five years in prison. News outlets report 51-year-old John Christopher Lemley was sentenced Tuesday to prison time and will have to forfeit nearly $1 million.

The 2010 Affordable Care Act ratcheted up taxes for the richest Americans while redirecting more than $16 billion to the poorest income bracket in the country, according to a report from the Congressional Budget Office. Several new taxes in the law— often referred to as Obamacare— increased the average tax burden of the richest 1 percent of Americans by about…

Nobody wants an all-out brawl over trade. Not China. Not the U.S. And certainly not anyone with investments.

CVS Health Corp. kicked off the third-largest corporate bond sale on record to fund its acquisition of Aetna, testing the appetite of a market that’s off to its worst annual start in decades. That would be surpassed only by Verizon Communication’s $49 billion offering in 2013 and Anheuser-Busch InBev’s $46 billion sale two years ago. With the Federal Reserve…

John Hancock Financial Services is moving back to the Back Bay. But now John Hancock is returning to its roots by shifting its approximately 1,100 workers at 601 Congress St. to two Back Bay buildings— 200 Berkeley Street, sometimes known as the Old John Hancock Building, with its distinctive weather beacon, and 197 Clarendon St. by the end of the year.

As policymakers prepare to address rising drug prices, a new report from Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., indicates some of the most popular brand-name drugs have increased by 12% on average each year from 2012 to 2017. Pharmaceutical companies saw profits soar to $8.5 billion even as prescriptions dropped by 48 million.

Aetna chief executive Mark Bertolini heads one of the biggest health insurers in the country and is on the cusp of a $69 billion megadeal to merge his company with pharmacy giant CVS. He says the future of health care is going to depend, mostly, on the time people spend outside the grasp of the traditional medical system. Bertolini sketched a vision of the future of…

Heading into retirement, more couples are calling it quits. “Retirement is often envisioned as a life stage where a couple finally gets time together,” writes Forbes contributor Joseph Coughlin, the founder and director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology AgeLab. “At a time when divorce is becoming less common for younger adults, so-called’ gray divorce’…

The benchmark Bloomberg Barclays U.S. Treasury index declined as much 3.67 percent between early September and late September. The Federal Reserve meeting last week, where the central bank raised interest rates for the fifth time in the last 15 months and signaled two more are on the way by the end of the year, should have breathed new life into the bears.

Family offices are increasingly preferred vehicles for centralizing the stewardship of family assets across multiple generations. However, even with the growing importance of family offices among ultra-high-net-worth families, issues relating to formal governance are often overlooked. When coupled with family wealth transfer techniques ranging…

Connecticut homeowners say they need additional financial assistance to help with crumbling home foundations that threaten to collapse their houses. Dozens of homeowners arrived in Hartford Monday to support a bill that proposes every insurance company cover the peril of collapse due to decay or the use of faulty construction materials. The Hartford Courant reports that insurance companies do not cover the replacement of a failing foundation currently.

Current retirees are generally in good shape, but that could change. Younger generations will need to rely more on personal savings, and many aren’t ready.

When you get really sick, the medical bills may not be your biggest financial shock.

March 21– ALBANY– New York State has reached a $230 million settlement with UBS in connection to its commerce in residential mortgage-backed securities leading up to the 2008 financial crisis. As part of this settlement, UBS admits that, contrary to its public statements, UBS sold investors RMBS backed by mortgage loans based on inaccurate statements in…

Republicans’ latest plan to stabilize the ACA exchanges would increase the deficit by $19 billion over the next 10 years if enacted, according to the Congressional Budget Office. However, an alternative estimate found the bill would result in a deficit reduction.

Critics of a proposed merger between Aetna and CVS have said the deal will hurt competition and cut local services. But Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini said the $69 billion deal doesn’t change the fact that the healthcare industry is moving toward a renaissance of community-based care. “Everything is going back to community,” he said at an event this week.

Congress’s last ship to carry measures to lower Obamacare premiums may set sail without them this week, and Republicans could face political backlash if costs rise in the 2019 marketplace.. With the next open-enrollment period set to kick off right before the midterm elections, observers say skyrocketing insurance premiums could end up hitting Republicans…

In response to the dramatic collapses of Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns, Congress created the Financial Stability Oversight Council to identify lightly regulated nonbank companies whose failure could trigger another financial crisis. Exercising this authority, FSOC designated American International Group, GE Capital, MetLife and Prudential as…

The Federal Reserve is set to raise interest rates again, and more increases could be coming. And that’s what worries Wall Street.

Robert Staffa was driving a friend home on Route 481 through Fulton on a rainy night in February when he hit “a trifecta” of potholes. Staffa filed a claim with the city of Fulton, but the city’s insurance carrier rejected it. Syracuse has received nearly 600 pothole complains so far this year, according to the city’s online pothole database.

“For middle-class people buying their own insurance, it could very well be that the premium increases will wipe out any savings they’ re getting from the tax cuts,” said Larry Levitt, senior vice president with the Kaiser Family Foundation, which studies health care. A study by Covered California, a government agency that oversees that state’ s health insurance…

March 16– The economic aftermath of climate change has heightened liability risks for insurance companies as weather catastrophes such as Hurricane Harvey become more frequent and severe, Moody’s Investors Service said in a new report. The credit ratings agency said problems arising from the earth’s warming climate, including larger financial losses,…

Find out which of these could fall off the list next year.

As Medicare Advantage grows in popularity, America’s Health Insurance Plans says it is vital that the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services fix the flaws in its funding formula to maintain the program’s stability. AHIP’s assessment rests on a new legal analysis that shows CMS calculates current benchmarks for Medicare Advantage using data from patients who are not eligible to participate in the program.

That can be a recipe for disaster sooner than you think.

Republican Sens. Lamar Alexander and Susan Collins have crafted legislation to shore up the Affordable Care Act’s exchanges that would fund cost-sharing reduction payments and reinsurance, but the plan doesn’t solve a partisan conflict over abortion provisions. 

March 13– As progressive activists clamor for California to push ahead a sweeping single-payer health plan, a legislative report released Tuesday cautioned that such an overhaul would take years. The report estimated that a healthcare overhaul that would cover all Californians under one system with public financing– including those who are insured…

Infant mortality here is far above the average for a group of 11 rich countries that includes the U.S.. Researchers from Harvard University and the London School of Economics and Political Science combed through the data to see whether common perceptions about the U.S. health system were indeed true. The countries in this group were Australia, Canada, Denmark,…

The San Francisco- based company has executed more than $1.7 billion in fixed income sales, primarily municipal bonds, since it begin trading in May, said Dave Rudd, a co-founder and managing director of institutional sales. John Lomangino joins the company’ s municipal institutional sales team led by Rudd from Cantor Fitzgerald, and will be based in the New York…

March 13– Pharmacy giant CVS stands accused of overcharging Ohio taxpayers millions in an attempt to drive out retail competition– a charge that CVS flatly denies. “Where I’m losing pharmacies right now is in high-Medicaid areas,” said Antonio Ciaccia of the Ohio Pharmacists Association. Medicaid, the federal-state health program for the poor and disabled, will…

A California insurance agent has been arrested on suspicion of defrauding elderly customers out of $1.6 million. The state insurance department said Monday that Mark Malatesta could face 16 felony charges related to the elaborate fraud scheme. It wasn’t immediately known if he has an attorney. Officials say Malatesta collected illegal commissions by falsifying information on annuity applications for at least six clients.