Family Health Insurance

TAMPA — Insurance giant Humana keeps adding employees in the Tampa Bay area, announcing today that it will hire an additional 130 people locally in coming months.

Humana said it is expanding its Humana Cares unit, which serves chronically ill insurance customers. The Louisville, Ky.-based company said the employees will be added by July at the Humana Cares national care center, located in the Carillon business park in St. Petersburg.

It will add an additional 47 people in other locations, bringing its new round of hiring to 177 people in all locations. Humana has been expanding its Humana Cares division rapidly over the past couple of years. Read more…

The film Casablanca features one of greatest moments in movie history. With Humphrey Bogart standing with a smoking pistol over the body of the dead Gestapo major, Claude Rains, in the role of the French colonel, tells his troops: “the major has been shot, round up the usual suspects.”

Unfortunately, the Washington policy gang is busy following Claude Rains’ instructions. The nation is drowning in endless accounts of how the huge deficit will sink the economy and the country. These accounts invariably feature stories of a Congress addicted to spending and a nation that wants government benefits that it doesn’t want to pay for.

This story has nothing to do with reality, as all budget analysts know. The exp

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After this past weekend of horrific storms and tornadoes, it was clearly appropriate for our elected officials to declare a federal disaster in some areas. With the designation comes some federal money and help for the storm-ravaged areas and residents. Few would quarrel with our government stepping up and stepping in when so many lives and so many livelihoods have been damaged and lost. It is the right thing to do, and some suffering will be mitigated.

Over the past four years since the making of SiCKO, Michael Moore’s 2007 documentary, an estimated 45,000 people each and every year have died simply because they lacked access to healthcare. T

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UnitedHealth Group says its first-quarter net income rose 13 percent, led by revenue gains in commercial health insurance. The managed care company also raised its full-year earnings forecast.

The Minnetonka, Minn., insurer says it earned 1.34 billion, or 1.22 per share, in the three months that ended March 31. That’s up from the 1.19 billion, or 1.03 per share, in the same quarter last year. Revenue rose 10 percent to 25.43 billion.

Analysts expected 89 cents per share on 24.97 billion in revenue.

UnitedHealth is the largest health insurer based on revenue and the first to report quarterly earnings.

The company now expects 2011 earnings per share to range between 3.95 and 4.05. Read more…

President Obama’s speech unveiling his deficit reduction plan contained few big surprises—by its very premise, it was destined to preserve the faulty assumptions behind the whole deficit discussion—but some of his words were welcome. The president called Social Security and Medicare fundamental American commitments and, in a rebuke to Congressman Paul Ryan, left these entitlement programs largely untouched. He also refused to renew Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy. It’s a pledge Obama has made—and broken—in the past, but let’s take at face value his sincerity on the matter. (All the better

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WASHINGTON — To a greater degree than most insurance company chiefs, Mark Bertolini has encountered his own personal challenges with the health care system.

Bertolini, the head of insurer Aetna, faced a tough time in 2001 when his teenage son Eric was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer that was considered incurable. Bertolini moved into his son’s hospital room for more than a year during treatment. At one point, his son’s prognosis was so grim that the family decided to place him in hospice, a move that meant signing “do not resuscitate” orders and making other difficult decisions.

That experience, Bertolini says, later helped guide him to make changes to hospice policy at Aetna to make it easier for families. Read more…

As an opening salvo from Republicans in the 2012 budget debate, the plan offered by Wisconsin’s Paul Ryan—supposedly a model of “seriousness” and “courage” next to overzealous Tea Partiers and Democrats silly enough to want to keep the government minimally functional—is remarkable mostly for its cynicism.

Consider Ryan’s approach to Medicare. One of the most fundamental tensions in our politics is that senior citizens are, simultaneously, the demographic group that most benefits from the welfare state and the one most sympathetic to the right-wing push to abolish it. The only age group in which McCain beat Obama was voters 60 and older. Part of the rea

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House Republicans plan this week to propose more than $4 trillion in federal spending reductions over the next decade by reshaping popular programs like Medicare, the Budget Committee chairman said Sunday in opening a new front in the intensifying budget wars.

Appearing on “Fox News Sunday,” the chairman, Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, also said Republicans would call for strict caps on all government spending that would require cuts to take effect whenever Congress exceeded those limits.

“We are going to put out a plan that gets our debt on a downward trajectory and gets us to a point of giving our next generation a debt-free nation,” Mr. Ryan sa

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