Marketplace
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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.…
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CMS Awards $67 Million to Assist Consumers with Accessing Coverage OE3 and Beyond
Let’s face it. Health insurance is complex, even for those of us who have worked in the field for years. Combine that with applying for means-tested financial assistance (through systems that are still being debugged), and there is no doubt that it can be a frustrating experience for consumers. Numerous studies have illustrated the critical…
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Consumer Assistance and Tools Needed to Ensure that All Eligible Marketplace Enrollees Get Cost-Sharing Reductions
Many of us have been asking this question for months: How many people who purchased coverage through the Marketplaces missed out on lower cost sharing because they did not enroll in a Silver plan? Now we have an estimate thanks to a new analysis by Avalere Health. Avalere’s headline – “More than 2 Million Exchange Enrollees…
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One Small Step Forward for Transparency & Regulatory Oversight
By Sabrina Corlette, Center on Health Insurance Reforms We at CHIR have been urging the federal agencies responsible for implementing the Affordable Care Act (the Departments of Health & Human Services, Labor and Treasury, often called the “tri-agencies”) to move forward with two key provisions designed to improve health plan transparency and regulatory oversight. The…
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How will Premium Rate Changes Affect Consumers’ Renewals into Marketplace Coverage?
By Sandy Ahn, Center on Health Insurance Reforms In a few weeks we’ll know just to what extent premium rates have changed for marketplace health plans in 2016 as states conclude their rate reviews by August 25. As we found in a recent report examining consumers’ renewal experiences in six state-based marketplaces, price is the…
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A Look at the Latest Controversy Brewing over the ACA: The Annual Limit on Out-of Pocket Costs
By JoAnn Volk, Center on Health Insurance Reforms The latest dust up in Washington is a fight between the Obama Administration and employer groups over the Affordable Care Act provision that limits consumers’ annual out-of-pocket costs. Employers are concerned that recent administration guidance “clarifying” the rules to implement this policy will increase their costs, particularly…
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Getting Ready for OE3 – New Kaiser Family Foundation Survey Provides Helpful Lessons
By Hannah Ellison and Sabrina Corlette, Georgetown University Center on Health Insurance Reforms It’s the dog days of August and many of us are in beach mode, but we at CHIR are getting geared up. We’re just 12 weeks away from the start of the third open enrollment period (OE3) for the Affordable Care Act’s health…
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Proposed Legislation Will Fix Medicaid Glitch for Former Foster Youth Who Move
I’ve written before about an unintended flaw in the Affordable Care Act that relates to Medicaid eligibility for former foster youth. The simple use of the words “the” versus “a” state has led to an interpretation of the law that allows states to deny coverage to young adults who were in foster care in a…
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King v Burwell: An Exercise in Sound and Fury Signifying Nothing
By Tim Westmoreland, Georgetown University O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Everyone within reach of an electronic device already knows that the Supreme Court has upheld the Affordable Care Act (ACA) again today. Tax subsidies can continue to assist low-income people in States that do not establish their own insurance exchanges. The death spiral…