Tomorrow and Friday morning, the FEHBlog will be attending the annual OPM-AHIP FEHBP carrier conference.

Today the FEHBlog followed a CAQH webinar on its Index product which measures trends in electronic healthcare transactions.  Here is a link to all of the info that was presented.  CAQH, which is financed by health insurers, does a lot of good work for the industry.

Yesterday, the Congressional Budget Office released its analysis of the President’s FY 2017 budget. On page 8 of this spreadsheet that forms part of the analysis, CBO concludes that OPM’s five legislative initiatives for the FEHBP will produce no budget savings.

The FEHBlog noticed today that early last month the CBO released its annual FEHBP overview which is a helpful reference publication.  For example,

The Federal Employees Health Benefits (FEHB) Program is the largest employer-sponsored health insurance program in the country. It provides more than $40 billion in health care benefits annually to employees and retirees of the federal government, the largest employer in the United States. In a typical year, FEHB provides health insurance coverage to about 8.2 million federal employees, retirees, and their dependents. Employees and retirees make up roughly half of that figure, or about 4 million policyholders. Of these, about 50% are retirees. Participation in FEHB is voluntary. About 85% of federal employees participate, and about 90% of retirees participate.

And it’s a managed competition program that works just fine.