A national advocacy group asked a Kansas federal judge to reject the state’s request to prohibit the group’s claim arguing that a law restricting insurance coverage for abortion discriminates against women.

In an effort to streamline the process of reporting possible fraud in a filed claim while also saving state insurance departments time and money, three national insurance groups are pooling resources.

Selling insurance products across state lines, seen by many as an efficient way to improve health care across the nation, hit a roadblock in Virginia this legislative session as four bills approving such a measure failed to gain approval.

With attorneys general from several states threatening to challenge the federal government’s newly-enacted health reform efforts, the association representing state insurance regulators says it will proceed as if the new guidelines are law.

Once lauded as a way for the federal government to aid states in conducting reviews of “unreasonable” rate increases on health insurance, a plan pitched by the Obama Administration is not in a health reform bill set for a vote March 21.

Increasingly cast as the villain in the nation’s rising cost for health care, five of the nation’s largest health care insurers met with the Obama Administration to argue that they are bit players in a much larger production.

The public option –long debated and absent from President Barack Obama’s health reform plan – appears to no longer be an option.

Kansas has become the fourth state this year, and the latest state over the last couple of years, to order several Tennessee-based companies to stop selling its products to residents.

A former Kansas City, Kan., insurance agent was sentenced to 15 years in jail, three years of supervised probation and must pay more than $3.1 million in restitution for his role in an insurance and mortgage fraud scheme.

Calling for industry-wide reform to solve the nation’s health care crisis, Maine’s insurance commissioner said the rising cost of insurance premiums is “slowly killing off the American middle class.”