By Martha Heberlein I don’t know what you did yesterday, but I spent the day eagerly awaiting CBO’s annual March baseline. As the “official scorekeepers” in Washington, their projections of spending and enrollment in Medicaid, CHIP, and coverage under the exchanges carry a lot of weight. Besides, who wouldn’t love the neat little tables they produce […]
By Joe Touschner HHS’s essential health benefits bulletin is less than two months old–in fact, the comment period just closed this week, click here for our comment letter–but some states are already planning for what it could mean for their residents. The Bulletin indicates that states will be able to choose the core of their […]
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 […]
So my previous blog on this topic talked about how the CHIP/Essential Health Benefits analogy has its limits – still it is interesting to look at the choices that states have made for their benefits packages in separate state CHIP programs. According to data collected and released by NASHP from mid-2008, the most popular choice […]
By Leigha Basini, National Academy for State Health Policy The new year brings many new things: new discussions about CCIIO’s newly released Essential Health Benefits (EHB) Bulletin and benefit provisions in the seemingly still new Affordable Care Act. But state CHIP directors may also be thinking about a slightly older benefit provision–the CHIPRA dental mandate. NASHP, […]
As soon as rumors started flying about what would be in the essential health benefits guidelines I thought hmmmm that sounds a lot like CHIP. At first blush the new guidance does sound like the CHIP model – indeed the guidance says as much (p. 8). But as HHS officials and others have pointed out, […]
