Mid-week update

Although it's the FEHBlog's job as a lawyer to belabor the obvious. the FEHBlog sees no reason in recounting yesterday's election results. The upshot from the FEHBP's perspective is that implementation of the Affordable Care Act continues full speed ahead. For the FEHBP, that means that Congress and their personal staff members will leave the FEHBP for the exchanges in 2014. Perhaps then the FEHBP will not be treated like a political football. (Query is that necessarily a bad thing.) The other change is that a plethora of ACA required taxes and fees will rain down the FEHBP necessarily leading to premium increases for 2014 above the low levels of the past two years.

Modern Healthcare compiled healthcare leader reactions to the election results here.

On Sunday, the FEHBlog noted a campaign to extend FEHBP coverage to first responders who work for FEMA as temporary employees. Earlier this year, OPM extended FEHBP coverage to first responders who work for the Forest Service as temporary employees and in the interim final rule implementing that change OPM solicited public input about adding other groups of first responders. Thus it did not come as much of a surprise to me when a colleague pointed out the following entry on reginfo.gov :

Office of Personnel Management

AGENCY: OPM	RIN: 3206-AM74
TITLE: Federal Employees Health Benefits Program Coverage for Certain Intermittent Employees
STAGE: Interim Final Rule	ECONOMICALLY SIGNIFICANT: No
** RECEIVED DATE: 11/06/2012	LEGAL DEADLINE: None
** COMPLETED: 11/06/2012	COMPLETED ACTION: Consistent with Change

The FEHBlog ran across press releases about Humana's acquisitions of Metropolitan Health Networks, a southern Florida company that owns 35 medical centers, and Certify Data Systems, a healthcare technology systems vendors to hospitals and other health care providers. These acquisitions are further examples of how health insurers are branching out into other related businesses where the government has not capped profits.

Finally, because the FEHBlog has been interested in the Walgreen's / Express Scripts saga, here is a link to a story from Investor Plan that brings you up to date. (Spoiler alert: CVS came out on top.)  The article notes that Walgreen's recently has dipped its toe back into the prescription benefit manager business by acquiring an interest in a  United Kingdom based PBM called Alliance Boots.