Price transparency is critical to the future of health reform, and the Lower Costs, More Transparency Act (H.R. 5378) will provide patients with accurate and timely information about the cost of important healthcare procedures and services.
The latest from Washington, D.C., impacting the insurance and financial services industries.
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The jobs market is seen as one of the key indicators of whether the Federal Reserve will keep record high interest rates steady or start lowering them as the economy cools down. The November jobs report showed that the U.S. economy added 199,000 jobs, according to the Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics. That dropped the U.S. unemployment rate to 3.7%…
When it comes to making decisions on interest rates, the personal consumption expenditures index, or PCE, is something the Federal Reserve pays a great deal of attention, said Ryan Loy, extension economist for the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture. The Federal Open Market Committee meets Dec. 12-13 to decide its next move on interest rates.
It has been a miracle year for the U.S. economy. Inflation has plummeted without triggering a recession. Many experts said that could not happen without widespread layoffs and a downturn.
—Can the U.S. economy achieve a much-hyped“ soft landing”? Friday's jobs report for November will provide some signs of whether that elusive scenario is coming into view. All of which means the Federal Reserve may stand an increasingly good chance of bringing inflation down to its 2% annual target without causing a deep recession— the common definition of a soft…
More than 250 members of the National Association of Insurance and Financial Advisors took to Capitol Hill today to meet with over 200 Congressional offices to advance the need to protect the worker classification of financial service professionals as independent contractors and to provide consumers a variety of choices in financial service professionals.
Ro Khanna and I disagree on any number of political questions, but I've never doubted his intelligence. Everyone knows Johnson's fiscal commission will recommend cuts in Social Security& Medicare. "The budget hawks in the GOP have been effectively vanquished by the Trump faction, and the days when Democrats strove to claim the mantle of fiscal responsibility…
Job openings in October dropped to their lowest total in more than two years according to new statistics from the Labor Department released on Tuesday. The monthly Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, which is closely watched by the Federal Reserve to find signs of slack in the labor market, showed that there were 8.73 million job openings in October, down…
U.S. inflation broadly slowed in October, which markets cheered as a strong indication that the Federal Reserve is done hiking interest rates. The S&P 500 index opened higher and Treasury yields declined significantly as traders essentially wiped out the chance of another rate hike. "The bar for further rate hikes is getting higher and higher," Wells Fargo& Co….
The 38 surveyed economists come from such organizations as Morgan Stanley, the University of Arkansas and Nationwide. Such predictions imply the belief that the Federal Reserve can pull off the delicate balancing act of slowing the economy just enough through high interest rates to get inflation under control, without snuffing out its growth completely.
Commentary: The NAIC must get its house in order
NAIC is not a federal regulatory agency. If it were, it would be subject to the kind of oversight that is expected of such entities.
The broadest Wall Street consensus, centered on signals from the bond market, Federal Reserve rate hikes and the likely impact they would have on hiring, had a 2023 recession as a near certainty. Related: Wall Street cheers lower inflation, but a new risk has investors on edge. "Although the headline numbers were revised higher and look rosy, it is concerning that…
The Biden administration needs to ensure that Florida and other states are not haphazardly removing the neediest from this vital health insurance. Congress passed a coronavirus relief package in 2020 that offered states additional federal funding in exchange for guaranteeing that recipients of Medicaid, a joint federal-state program for low-income…
Martin O’ Malley toward commissioner of the Social Security Administration, nudging President Biden’ s pick to a confirmation vote before the full Senate. Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and Thom Tillis of North Carolina joined Democrats in advancing Mr. The Social Security Administration processes and doles out retirement, disability,…
WASHINGTON— A key Federal Reserve official raised the possibility Tuesday that the Fed could decide to cut its benchmark interest rate as early as spring if inflation keeps declining steadily. Christopher Waller, a member of the Fed's Board of Governors, cautioned that inflation is still too high and that it's not yet certain if a recent slowdown in price…
President Joe Biden certainly hopes so, since the marks he's getting from the American people for his handling of the economy are some of the lowest on record. Look at a recent Financial Times/ University of Michigan poll that showed just 14% of voters said that financially, they were in a better position now. Heritage Foundation economist Richard Stern…
The clawbacks have ballooned from about $9 million in 2010 to $12.6 billion in 2021, according to the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, an agency created to advise Congress on the program for people who are 65 and older or have disabilities. Pharmacist groups supported the Medicare rule change, but they didn't anticipate the PBMs' response, which has been…
—Austan Goolsbee, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, suggested Monday that the economy appears to be on what he calls the“ golden path,” another term for what economists call a“ soft landing,” in which the Fed would curb inflation without causing a deep recession. “Any time we’ ve had a serious cut to the inflation rate, it’ s come with a major recession, "…
Jason Bleak runs Battle Mountain General Hospital, a small facility in a remote Nevada gold mining town that he described as“ out here in the middle of nowhere.”. When several representatives from private health insurance companies called on him a few years ago to offer Medicare Advantage plan contracts so their enrollees could use his hospital, Bleak sent them…
In case you missed it, our federal government is now estimated to pay more than $1 trillion a year to service just the interest on our national debt- about $200 billion more than we spend on our military or Medicare. In 2020 President Trump signed off on about $3 trillion in covid relief spending and a year later President Biden signed on for a few trillion more.
