Health insurers are expected to make it more difficult on Presidential candidates pushing single payer versions of “Medicare for All” after they added hundreds of thousands of seniors to their private Medicare Advantage plans this year. New benefits for seniors under Medicare Advantage began Wednesday, the first day of the 2020 New Year, in what has already been a record for the number of health plans participating in a program that offers seniors the same benefits as traditional Medicare plus extras like preventative care and outpatient healthcare services.  

 Politicians spent the better part of 2019 bickering over the best way to lower drug prices. But in the meantime, states, advocates — even the drug and insurance industries — were devising novel strategies for solving this perplexing challenge. 2020 will be the year many of those experimental ideas are tested. If they pan out, they’ll undoubtedly be models for other states or companies — and perhaps serve as inspiration for Washington, too. STAT looks at three of the most interesting ideas 

  Obamacare was supposed to fix all of this — so why are so many Americans still uninsured, even when they qualify for subsidized and even free insurance? According to a new analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation, “28% of uninsured individuals who could shop on the Marketplace, or 4.7 million people nationwide, are eligible to purchase a bronze plan with $0 premiums after subsidies in 2020. This figure is similar to 2019, when 27% of uninsured individuals, or 4.2 million people, could purchase a no-premium bronze plan.”  

 Even with access to health insurance at a historic high in the state, a growing share of uninsured Californians say they struggle to afford coverage, according to new survey results. The new data show the share of people in the state who say cost is their main reason for being uninsured inched upward for the third consecutive year in 2018, according to UCLA’s California Health Interview Survey. Nearly four out of every 10 uninsured residents, or 37%, said the price of insurance was the leading reason for not having coverage.  

  Drugmakers including Bristol-Myers Squibb, Gilead Sciences, and Biogen hiked U.S. list prices on more than 50 drugs on Wednesday, bringing total New Year's Day drug-price increases to more than 250, according to data analyzed by the healthcare research firm 3 Axis Advisors. Reuters reported on Tuesday that drugmakers including Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline, and Sanofi SA were planning to increase prices on more than 200 drugs in the United States on Jan. 1. Nearly all of the price increases are below 10%, and the median price increase is about 5%, according to 3 Axis.  

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