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The Trump administration is encouraging consumers on the Obamacare individual market to seek help from private brokers, who are permitted to sell short-term health plans that critics deride as “junk” because they don’t protect people with preexisting conditions, or cover costly services such as hospital care, in many cases. Consumers looking at their health insurance options on the website for the federal marketplace, called healthcare.gov, may be redirected to other enrollment sites, some of which allow consumers to click a tab entitled “short-term plans” and see a list of those plans, often with significantly cheaper premiums. (Abutaleb, 11/20)

Dr. Emilie Scott was only a few months into her first job when she started hearing the complaint: She was spending too much time with each patient. Like many primary care doctors working in large medical systems, Scott was encouraged to see a new patient every 20 minutes. But that was barely enough time to talk and do a physical. (11/20)

More Americans turn to out-of-network providers when seeking mental health care than when seeking medical care, and the trend continues to worsen, a new study shows, despite a law designed to prevent this problem for people seeking treatment for conditions such as depression and addiction. In an update of a landmark report about access to mental health treatment, researchers found that the disparity between medical coverage and mental and behavioral health coverage continued to grow in 2016 and 2017. (Koons, 11/20)

A report published Wednesday by Milliman, a risk management and health care consulting company, found that patients were dramatically more likely to resort to out-of-network providers for mental health and substance abuse treatment than for other conditions. The disparities have grown since Milliman published a similarly grim study two years ago. The latest study examined the claims data of 37 million individuals with commercial PPO health insurance plans in all 50 states from 2013 to 2017. (Gold, 11/20)

Cigna Corp. is open to making more acquisitions, Chief Executive Officer David Cordani said, almost a year after the health insurer bought drug-benefit manager Express Scripts. An expected $8 billion in free cash flow in 2020 should give Cigna “strategic optionality,” Cordani said in an interview with Bloomberg TV’s David Westin at the Economic Club of New York on Wednesday. (Tozzi, 11/20)

Lawmakers are facing crunch time in a bipartisan push to pass legislation protecting patients from getting hit with massive “surprise” medical bills. Staff in both chambers and both parties are having what Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) called “intense meetings” to try to come to an agreement in time to be included in a government funding package ahead of a Dec. 20 deadline. (Sullivan, 11/21)