Thursday, September 06, 2018

Thursday follow-up

The Wall Street Journal reports that the Justice Department is expected to approve from an anti-trust enforcement stand points the CVS Health - Aetna and the Cigna - Express Scripts mergers in the next few weeks.
The companies that would emerge from the two deals would mirror the industry’s trend toward bulked-up firms. UnitedHealth Group Inc. is the parent of the largest U.S. health insurer and a major pharmacy-benefit manager; it has a growing array of physician practices, urgent-care clinics and other assets.
The mergers are expected to close this year.

Modern Healthcare reports from Austin that
A federal judge today seemed skeptical of arguments that the Affordable Care Act can stand without an effective penalty for the individual mandate.  In a half-full Texas courtroom, Democratic state attorneys general Wednesday tried to persuade U.S. District Judge Reed O'Connor that Congress' zeroing out of the tax penalty should not invalidate the entire law. O'Connor, who spent more time probing the argument of Democratic lawyers than that of the GOP state attorneys general who filed the suit to invalidate the law, promised the parties that he would issue a ruling as quickly as possible.
Of course, this is all tea leaf reading, but the FEHBlog think this case is worth watching.

 

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