Julie Rovner

The Treasury Department is scrapping the rule that requires people to use or lose the money they set aside each year in accounts to cover health care expenses that are otherwise unreimbursed.

Instead, the department plans to allow people to carry over up to $500 of unused money to ...

As if the rollout of the federal health law didn't have enough problems, abortion is back in the spotlight.

How the various health plans in the exchanges would or would not pay for abortion was one of the very last issues settled before the bill was passed in 2010. ...

Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill don't agree on much when it comes to health care.

But, believe it or not, leaders from both parties on two key committees have come up with a plan to fix a longstanding problem with the formula that pays doctors who treat Medicare ...

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius headed to Capitol Hill Wednesday for a date with lawmakers frustrated by the rocky rollout of the HealthCare.gov website.

What she got at the House Energy and Commerce Committee was four hours of venting from Democrats and Republicands alike.

Like Medicare and Medicaid ...

When the head of the agency responsible for the troubled Healthcare.gov went before Congress for the first time since its foibles became apparent Oct. 1, she probably didn't expect that many questions would be on something else altogether.

But the website turned out not to be the focus of ...

Monday was yet another troubled day for the Affordable Care Act.

Sunday night, the outside vendor that operates two key parts of the website that lets people browse and sign up for health insurance experienced a failure.

The failure took place at a vendor called Verizon Terremark and presumably ...

The Obama administration has entered full damage-control mode over the balky website intended to enroll people in new health plans under the Affordable Care Act.

Senior officials met Wednesday morning with Democrats on Capitol Hill, and in the afternoon insurance CEOs got an audience at the White House. Tomorrow ...

President Obama Tuesday appointed one of his top management gurus, Jeffrey Zeints, to head the team working to fix what ails Healthcare.gov, the troubled website that's supposed to allow residents of 36 states enroll in coverage under the Affordable Care Act.

But even if the team gets the website working ...

Hear the words health care and Congress, and you think fight, right?

And you'd be forgiven, particularly because the House has now voted some 40 times in the past two years to repeal or otherwise undo portions of the Affordable Care Act.

But something unusual happened just before Congress ...

With the launch of the major piece of the Affordable Care Act less than a month away, the Obama administration is escalating the public relations push with one of their most effective weapons – former President Bill Clinton, now known to many as explainer in chief.

Speaking from his ...

With new health insurance exchanges set to launch in just over a month, there's been a lot of chatter about how shocking the rates might be.

One possibility is that adding sick people to a more comprehensive benefits package will cause premiums to soar. Last spring, the Society ...

Opponents of the Affordable Care Act often talk about how unpopular it is.

And this month's tracking poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation bears them out. Negative views of the law (42 percent) top positive ones (37 percent).

But Republicans who have been barnstorming the country this ...

The Oct. 1 launch of the new health insurance exchanges is now less than two months away, and people are starting to pay attention to the changes these new marketplaces may bring to the nation's health care system.

We know it's confusing, so we're spending part of the summer ...

With less than eight weeks to go before the official launch of the new health care marketplaces under the federal health law, backers of the law are ramping up to encourage people to sign up.

But there's another effort gearing up this month as well. Opponents ...

Finally, the federal HR department has released the health rule much of Capitol Hill has been waiting for.

There's now an explanation from the Office of Personnel Management on how members of Congress and much of their staff will get their health insurance starting next year.

At issue is ...

It's hardly news that people are having trouble understanding the nitty-gritty of the Affordable Care Act. Recent polls have detailed the difficulties.

But work by economists at Carnegie Mellon University suggests a big reason for the confusion that's been largely overlooked: The public doesn't understand how health insurance works ...

As its last official action before leaving for a five-week summer break, the House today voted — for the 40th time — to block implementation of the federal health law.

But it was something that happened late Thursday night affecting members of Congress and their staffers' own health insurance ...

Of all the contentious claims about the Affordable Care Act, few have been more contentious than over the impact it's having on employers.

It's hard to pick up a newspaper or turn on a television without seeing a story about some boss cutting workers' hours or saying he ...

As expected, the Food and Drug Administration has granted an additional three years of protection from generic competition to the makers of the most popular form of the emergency contraceptive pill, Plan B One-Step.

The decision is one of the last formal pieces of business as the drug ...