A useful new government website has just gone live, offering easy teaching points for parents who want to help their kids grow up knowing a thing or two about compound interest and 19 other key financial concepts.
Health Insurance
Here are six low-tech healthcare services readily available to seniors and which will vastly improve their quality of life, according to the Hartford Foundation. Did you know that Medicare pays the full cost of one wellness checkup each year?
Retirement readiness is near an all-time low. Just 14% of adults are very confident they will live comfortably after quitting work and 60% have less than $25,000 in savings, according to the Employee Benefits Research Institute’s most recent Retirement Confidence Survey.
A report on rising drug prices has set off alarms among retirement planners.
Initially, the controversy over President Obama’s proposal that all insurers cover contraception focused on religious liberty. After polls revealed that 98% of sexually active Catholic women have used birth control, though, some who oppose Obamacare tried to shift the argument from religion to money: “If insurers are forced to offer contraception without co-pays,” they warn, [...]
The nation’s health care bill rose by less than 4% in both 2009 and 2010. In 50 years, health care spending has never increased at such a slow pace. Could this mean that, after a half century of eye-popping inflation in health care expenditures, efforts to rein in costs are actually working?
On Wednesday, Charleston’s Post & Courier.com revealed that South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley has actively used her influence to prevent the implementation of federal health care reform — and, arguably, spending federal funds to do so.
Drug prices almost always fall after a manufacturer’s patent expires and generics hit the market. But with its blockbuster cholesterol-fighting drug Lipitor going off-patent this week, drug maker Pfizer has launched an all-out price war against generics manufacturers to hang onto market share. In fact, you can now buy Lipitor for about 80% off its original [...]
Nobody would be surprised to hear that spending more on healthcare will result in new jobs. But a new program announced by the Obama administration last week seeks to create new healthcare jobs and at the same time reduce healthcare costs. Is such a trick possible?
Many of the health care law’s critical details still need to be spelled out, and one of the most important open questions — What “essential services” must all insurance plans cover? — will be answered before the year is up.
Last week, the Obama administration quietly abandoned the CLASS Act, a provision slipped into health care reform two years ago that would have ensured funding for assisted living for the frail and elderly before they went bankrupt.
