By Joe Touschner

It’s a busy month on the essential health benefits front!  As we’ve noted, one option for states under the proposed approach for state-defined EHB packages is to use one of the state’s three largest small group plans as a benchmark.  It’s been difficult to evaluate this proposal because we didn’t know which plans were the three largest in each state–even state insurance commissions don’t always have this information.

Well, on Wednesday, HHS released a list of what it believes to be the three largest small group plans for every state.  It relies on data insurers submitted to Healthcare.gov from June of 2011.  The list comes with many disclaimers, so we can’t take it as the official small group choices for states, but it’s a start.

This info is useful to have, but we still need to know more about these plans to fully evaluate the EHB proposal.  We need to know exactly what the plans cover and what they exclude.  The list of plan names from HHS at least gives us a place to start in digging up that information.