Enrollment Assistance
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Strong Medicaid Enrollment So Far No Surprise to Me
I was going to write this blog earlier in the week but got waylaid by meetings, meetings and more meetings! Today I wake up and see a front-page story in the Washington Post: Medicaid Tops Private Plans in Tallies of New Sign-Ups. It’s not very often that you see a front page story on Medicaid…
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Under Pressure: An Update on Restrictive State Insurance Marketplace Consumer Assistance Laws
By Justin Giovanelli, Georgetown University’s Center on Health Insurance Reforms To help consumers enroll in the recently opened health insurance marketplaces, the Affordable Care Act created outreach and consumer assistance positions such as “navigators,” in-person assisters, and certified application counselors. Though they are subject to uniform federal standards, in practice, these programs range widely from…
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Measuring ACA Enrollment: Lessons from Medicare Part D
The criticisms continue to roll in, with critics saying that the websites do not work well, that people are visiting the website but not enrolling, and that there are too few enrollees. What expectations are reasonable? What can we learn from the introduction of the Medicare Part D drug benefit in the fall of 2005?…
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How Will Immigrants Fare Under Health Reform? Encouraging Enrollment
By Dinah Wiley Immigrants who are eligible for Medicaid and CHIP, compared to their citizen counterparts, are less likely to sign up for health coverage. Why is this so? It’s true that newcomers to the U.S. are more healthy than native-born Americans, for a few years at least. Yet when immigrants are offered private insurance…
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Answering Your Questions on Certified Application Counselors
I’ve been getting lots of questions on certified application counselors, so I thought it was time to loop back to this issue and try to answer a few based on what I’ve heard along the way. How long does it take to receive approval of a CAC application? HHS has received several thousand applications from…
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Tech Tuesday: The Wish List for Phase II of the Medicaid and CHIP Performance Indicators
Last week, I blogged about the release of phase I performance indicators requiring states to report the data elements “most critical to measuring the outcomes of the Medicaid and CHIP eligibility and enrollment process.” I am already thinking about phase II of the Medicaid and CHIP performance metrics but the most obvious question at this…
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Tech Tuesday: Electronic Notices Are Coming to Medicaid and CHIP, But Maybe Not Until 2015
In looking again at the “cats and dogs regulations” released in July, I see that CMS has removed any ambiguity about providing Medicaid and CHIP notices electronically. The health care law directs states to provide consumers with the option to receive notices in a secure, electronic format in lieu of written notices by regular mail.…
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Navigators Should Not Let Politics Thwart Their Important Work
Yet another attempt in a very long line of efforts to delay or derail the health care law came in the waning hours of summer after many people had already checked out for the Labor Day weekend. About half of the 104 organizations that were awarded federal navigator grants received an official demand from ranking…
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New Medicaid and CHIP Enrollment Data Indicates Slowdown in Growth but Continued Impact of Recession Lingers
By Tara Mancini The latest data from the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured on Medicaid and CHIP enrollment indicate that growth continues to slow after several years of higher recession-fueled enrollment increases. Between June 2011 and June 2012, the growth rate in Medicaid was 2.5%, slightly less than a third of the growth…
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Poverty Itself Makes Everything Harder, Even Filling Out Forms
Anyone who has been up all night with an infant (or reading health reform regulations), knows how foggy you feel the next day, and how hard it is to even complete simple tasks. A new study in Science shows that the condition of being poor causes a cognitive drop similar to pulling an all-nighter.…
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Updates on Consumer Assistance: Navigator Grants and Training
By Sabrina Corlette, Georgetown University Center on Health Insurance Reforms This has been a busy month for those of us eager for robust consumer assistance to help people enroll in the new health insurance marketplaces, which launch on October 1, 2013. First, the Administration released a set of on-line training materials for certified application counselors (CACs) and in-person assisters.…
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Blending In-Person Assistance and Self-Service Online Applications for Health Insurance
By Gene Lewit, Stanford University Health Policy Center for Primary Care and Outcomes Research The countdown to October 1 has begun, when millions will begin to enroll in health insurance under the Affordable Care Act (ACA). The ACA seeks to make enrollment easier by asking states to provide online enrollment systems. These new portals are…
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Tech Tuesday: HHS Provides Guiding Principles for Telephone Applications
“No wrong door,” a phrase coined to explain access to all the insurance affordability programs (Medicaid, CHIP and subsidized coverage through a Health Insurance Marketplace) through a single application process, is also often used to describe the different paths to enrollment. Beginning October 1, 2013, states are expected to allow individuals to apply online, over…
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HHS Announces Navigator Awards
As October 1 fast approaches, we continue to learn more about resources available in states to help guide families through the enrollment process. Today, HHS announced recipients of $67 million in grants to fund navigators in the 33 states where the federal government will operate the insurance marketplaces. (We outlined the funding opportunity on Say Ahh!…
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There’s a Hole in Our Bucket: Addressing Children’s Health Insurance Churn
By Ashley Storms, New England Alliance for Children’s Health Pursuing health coverage for all children can sometimes feel like pouring water into a leaky bucket. Even when outreach and enrollment efforts are strong, a substantial portion of children will lose their insurance at least once. Unstable insurance coverage, known as “churn,” is inefficient and keeps…
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Tech Tuesday: How Kids Coverage Has Innovated Technology-Based Solutions to Maximize Enrollment
Over the past several years, I have had the pleasure of participating as a technical assistance faculty member for Maximizing Enrollment, a national program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation with technical assistance and direction provided by the National Academy of State Health Policy. The program works intensively with eight states to (as the name…
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Certified Application Counselors
Trusted community-based organizations and health care providers have been a key part of our nation’s success in bringing the rate of uninsured children down to an historic low. These community partners will also be an important resource in connecting consumers to new coverage options under the Affordable Care Act. In particular, certified application counselors (CACs)…
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Tech Tuesday: Visit “Healthcare.Gov” or YouTube to Get a Taste of What’s Around the Corner
Working in the weeds of health policy, it’s easy to get bogged down in the minutiae of the health care law. And in the media, we are constantly bombarded with the aspects of the law that are most controversial or problematic. So sometimes we lose perspective (I know I do) as we seek perfection in…
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Consumer Group Creates Set of Customer Service Standards for Marketplace Call Centers
By Betsy Imholz, Special Projects Director, Consumers Union Think of the last time you called your cable company to respond to the latest promotion or to ask a billing question. Recall the ache in the pit of your stomach, the cringing expectation you’d be put on hold, shuffled from person to person, denied the promised…
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Final Regulations on Navigators, In-Person Assisters and Certified Application Counselors
It was another hot summer Friday for regulations with the release of the final rule on navigator and non-navigator assisters (aka in-person assisters) and Exchange-based certified application counselors (CAC). (Don’t our friends at CMS know that we like to take weekends off?) All in all, the proposed rules for navigators were finalized with minimal changes…