Marketplace
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States Enact Policies to Help Protect Consumers from High Prescription Drug Costs
High prices for prescription drugs have been in the news lately. There is the eye-popping price of the life-saving hepatitis C drug Sovaldi ($1,000 a pill) and the announcement that Turing Pharmaceuticals would increase the price of Daraprim, a drug to treat a rare but serious infection, by 5,000 percent. At the same time, insurance companies are shifting…
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Shop to Renew Health Coverage During Open Enrollment
By Sandy Ahn, Center on Health Insurance Reforms Similar to last year’s open enrollment, the federally facilitated marketplace (FFM) will automatically renew consumers into coverage if they do not go back to the marketplace to update their information and select a plan. This means that eligible consumers will be automatically re-enrolled into coverage and receive…
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$32 Million Now Available to Help Reach Eligible but Unenrolled Kids
Most uninsured children are eligible for Medicaid or CHIP but are not yet enrolled so finding them and helping them enroll is critical to successfully reducing the uninsured rate for children. As my colleague Tricia Brooks has pointed out many times, it is no secret that sustained outreach and enrollment support is the key to…
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Targeted Medicaid Enrollment Reaches More Kids
By Suzanne Wikle, CLASP The rate of children without health insurance has hit an all-time low of 6 percent, according to a new report from the Center for Children and Families. The drop is largely attributable to the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and to states’ efforts to increase enrollment. States that have opted to expand Medicaid…
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Healthcare.Gov Promises a Snazzier Production for OE3
Yesterday marked the debut of the third open enrollment period for the Health Insurance Marketplaces, including Healthcare.gov, which is the storefront to the Marketplace in 37 states. Has the performance improved? What new bells and whistles will delight the audience? Faster lines at the box office. Although it looks the same to consumers, new account…
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Nondiscrimination and the Affordable Care Act
The Office for Civil Rights at the Department of Health and Human Services released a proposed rule on Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act on September 8, 2015. Section 1557 prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, national origin (including immigration status and English language proficiency), sex, age, or disability in any program…
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Child Uninsured Rate Hits Historic Low – Thanks Goes Mainly to ACA, Medicaid & CHIP
Like many of you I was super excited to see the first round of data from the Census Bureau looking at health insurance rates in 2014 when it came out in late September. Needless to say, 2014 was a big year for health policy changes! Today we are releasing our annual report focused specifically on…
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ACA Helps Bring Child Uninsured Rate Down To New Record Low
This year’s American Community Survey (ACS) data from 2014 provide a first look at how the implementation of the ACA is affecting coverage rates for children – both nationwide and in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Our analysis looks at the profile of uninsured children in 2014 and examines rates of change…
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Half of the Uninsured are Eligible for ACA Coverage
by Jordan Messner, Graduate Research Intern The Kaiser Family Foundation published a report on October 13 examining the uninsured population in the United States and their options for coverage under the Affordable Care Act (ACA). The report found that although 32.3 million nonelderly people were uninsured at the beginning of 2015, 49% of these individuals (15.7…
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CMS Should Require More Transparency from Insurers
By Sean Miskell As the Affordable Care Act has been successful in its efforts to expand coverage to millions of Americans, the attention of policymakers, advocates, and families will increasingly turn to the value of this coverage and the nature of the choices available to those looking for insurance in the marketplace. The more data…
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More People Have Health Coverage in Every State Thanks to ACA; Yet Some of the Poorest are Being Left Behind
by Suzanne Wikle, Projector Director, Advancing Strategies for Aligning Programs, CLASP When President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act (ACA) into law, advocates hailed it as the most important health legislation since the creation of Medicaid and Medicare in 1965 — and one of the most important anti-poverty laws in decades as well. The monumental…
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Arkansas’s Health Care Reform Forum: Medicaid Expansion and the Private Option
How has the Affordable Care Act and health care reform directly affected consumers and access to health care? How does Medicaid expansion relate to the broader health reform effort? How has Arkansas’s Private Option affected the state’s health care system? What makes a premium assistance model appealing for health care Arkansas and other states? These…
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Medicare Part D After Ten Years: Lessons for the Affordable Care Act
The first ten years of Medicare Part D offers valuable insight into the future of the Affordable Care Act. In July 2013, a team of Georgetown researchers looked at Medicare Part D for some key lessons that the program offered to those implementing the Affordable Care Act. Part D started life during its implementation in…
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Many working parents in Georgia would benefit from closing health coverage gap
by Cindy Zeldin, Executive Director, Georgians for a Healthy Future It’s often assumed that if you have a job, you have health insurance. That’s not the case for many working families in Georgia, though, because our state leaders haven’t accepted the federal funding set aside for us to extend cost-effective Medicaid coverage to more uninsured…
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New Health Insurance Data Shows More Kentucky Kids are Covered
By Terry Brooks, Kentucky Youth Advocates New health insurance data recently released by the U.S. Census Bureau revealed that health insurance coverage rates for both children and adults increased in Kentucky from 2013 to 2014. The one-year estimates from the American Community Survey revealed that 95.7 percent of Kentucky children under 18 had health insurance in…
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Why ACA Marketplaces Should Report Comprehensive Enrollment Data
By Sean Miskell Data can play an important role in improving health care systems. The state-based marketplaces established under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) are well positioned to advance policy decisions by disclosing detailed information about enrollment. Such information could improve oversight of the post-ACA insurance market, and help policymakers and others more easily identify…
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Children’s Uninsured Rate Drops Significantly Thanks to the Affordable Care Act
By now you have heard the news that from 2013 to 2014 the country saw the greatest single year decline in the number of uninsured Americans on record with the overall uninsured rate falling to 10.4%. For children, using the American Community Survey data that was just released, the decline was smaller, but only because…
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What to know about the Census Bureau’s new ACS and CPS data on health coverage
On September 16, 2015 the Census Bureau will release data from the Current Population Survey (CPS) and American Community Survey (ACS), providing updated income, poverty, and health insurance coverage rates for 2014. These reports should give the best picture of the effects of the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) major coverage expansions on the uninsured rate.…
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More than 400,000 Lose Marketplace Coverage: Let’s Fix This and Keep People Covered
Along with the headline yesterday that nearly 10 million consumers paid their premiums and had an active marketplace health insurance policy as of the end of June 2015, there was very disappointing news. The federally facilitated marketplace (FFM) already terminated overage for about 423,000 people with 2015 coverage who had immigration or citizenship status data matching…
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Seven Steps for Children’s Advocates Reviewing Essential Health Benefit Benchmarks
HHS recently posted the proposed 2017 Essential Health Benefit (EHB) benchmark benefit plans (BBP) and supporting documents for the 50 states and DC. Though the 30-day public comment period is short, it provides an important opportunity for state advocates and stakeholders to review their state’s EHB BBP and raise any concerns before final federal approval.…