Tuesday's health stories
Centene buys Fidelis Care for $3.75 billion
Centene is acquiring Fidelis Care, a health insurance company sponsored by Catholic dioceses in New York, for $3.75 billion. The deal would give Centene its first presence in New York and immediately beef up Centene's already large Medicaid, Medicare Advantage and Affordable Care Act exchange businesses.
Why it matters: Centene bought Health Net in 2016, and it's expanding rapidly on the ACA marketplaces. Centene is one of the largest health care companies most people have never heard of, mostly because it covers low-income people and has numerous subsidiaries with different names.
The big question: Whether the deal will change Fidelis Care's policy of not providing abortion and other reproductive services within its health benefits.
Uninsured rate dipped to 8.8% in 2016
The number of Americans who did not have health insurance was at another all-time low last year, according to new data from the Census Bureau. The numbers:
- 8.8% uninsured rate (a decrease of 0.3 percentage points from 2015).
- 28.1 million Americans still had no health coverage.
- 16% of Hispanics don't have health insurance, the highest of all races.
- 55.7% of insured people get health insurance through their job.
The big takeaway: The number of Americans that don't have health insurance has mostly plateaued. The Affordable Care Act wasn't designed to cover everyone. But the ACA's coverage provisions, especially the expansion of Medicaid, have contributed to the record-low uninsured rate.