Back in March, the Colorado Division of Insurance launched a review of the rate increase they had previously approved for Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield individual policies. It was a process that was supposed to be finished in just a couple months, but might end up taking the rest of the year as analysts consider all of the data involved in determining what rates were appropriate for 2010. Anthem is so far the only Colorado carrier that has been subjected to such protracted scrutiny by the Division of Insurance, but as we noted when the issue first came up, Anthem’s 2010 rates were very much in line with what other individual carriers were charging this year. It
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Many people have the hope of staying in their homes for a lifetime, especially as they grow old. It is usually possible, but there are certain periods in life when people may need a little more help – mainly when it comes to shopping for food, cooking, or even taking a bath – and these periods tend to fall between the eighties and nineties. Other people need help even more frequently and this could mean that it is the right time to move to a geriatric home where a group of professionals will be waiting to take full care of them, and this is the exact time where long term care insurance becomes really helpful.
Families can sometimes realize when a relative is not able to share the house anymore. It
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Maggie Mahar’s articles are typically well worth reading, and her take on why a single payer health care system is not a practical or affordable idea for the near future is no exception. The idea stems from the hope of some liberals that conservatives will overturn the Affordable Care Act (ACA), disaster will ensue in the health care system, and this will pave the way for a single payer system.
But Maggie points out that this isn’t likely to be the case (instead, we’d just end up with continuing unchecked price increases for health care services, and correlated increases in health insurance premiums). She m
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Several provisions in the new health care reform law will begin to take effect next month. More changes will take place over the next three years, leading up the biggest changes in 2014, when all individual policies will have to be guaranteed issue, and everyone will be required to have health insurance.
The only way an insurance policy will be able to avoid some of the changes implemented by the new law is to retain grandfathered status, basically by keeping the policy mostly unchanged from the way it was on March 23, 2010, when the law was passed. But it turns out that the benefits of grandfathering a policy aren’t really worth the restrictions involved, for most US companies. Ni
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