Marketplace
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Highest Court in the Land Upholds the Affordable Care Act (Twice)!
Just like most of you, I took a deep breath when I saw the Supreme Court decision in King v Burwell announced today. Here at CCF, we all high-fived but now I’m lamenting the fact that we had to waste all of this time and energy worrying about what would happen if the opponents of…
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First Peek at Health Coverage Rates Post-ACA: Uninsurance Drop in 2014
Hot off the press! Today we get our first look at annual insurance coverage data from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) for 2014 and the results are in: fewer people were uninsured in 2014—the first year of full ACA implementation— than 2013. Children and adults in Medicaid expansion states had lower rates of uninsurance.…
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Changes to the Affordable Care Act’s Health Plan Summaries – and More to Come
One of the early reforms in the Affordable Care Act (ACA) – and the most popular, by some polls – is the requirement that plans and insurers provide easy-to-read summaries of plan benefits, cost sharing and rules. The Summary of Benefits and Coverage (SBC) is a standardized, 8-page form that allows consumers to make apples-to-apples…
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Waiting on King… what’s at stake?
It feels like déjà vu. The health policy world is waiting on pins and needles to see what the Supreme Court has to say about the viability of the Affordable Care Act. On possible decision days, all browsers are pointed to SCOTUSblog.com. But this time we are waiting for a decision in King v. Burwell…
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What, Exactly, is in that CHIP Extension?
It’s hard to believe it was just last month when Congress passed and President Obama signed the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act (MACRA) of 2015, which extended CHIP funding for two additional years with no major structural or program changes. It funds the ACA’s 23%-point bump, extends CHIPRA’s child health quality provisions and outreach/enrollment…
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Celebrate or Condemn Enrollment Success? Affordable Care Act Critics Can’t Decide
Health care policy debates can often be confusing but the rapidly shifting positions in the latest tempest on Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act are harder to follow than a ping-pong ball. For background one has to travel back to 2013 as major glitches in the healthcare.gov website were adversely affecting initial enrollment in the…
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State-Based Marketplaces Looking for Financing Stability in Shifting Landscape
By Sean Miskell Over the last few months, state-based health insurance marketplaces have navigated a largely successful second open enrollment period and a mostly uneventful first tax season for marketplace consumers. Yet state-based marketplaces continue to face important decisions, such as determining the size of their operating budgets and how to finance them. Because marketplaces…
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States Need to Select Essential Health Benefit Benchmark Plans for 2017 Soon!
Did you know states need to select their Essential Health Benefits (EHB) benchmark plan for 2017 in just a few weeks? If not, you could be forgiven for missing this one. There’s plenty going on to capture your attention – the wait for the Supreme Court to weigh in on premium tax credits in federally…
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New and Improved! A Special Enrollment Period for Some Caught in Medicaid Coverage Gap
As part of our Robert Wood Johnson Foundation-funded Navigator Technical Assistance project, we’ve helped Navigators and assisters answer tough questions from consumers. Many questions focused on special enrollment periods (SEPs), including a new “tax season” SEP that applied to individuals who learned about the requirement to have coverage only when they found out they were…
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Healthcare.gov Fixes System Glitch in Counting Social Security Income for Certain Tax Dependents
Earlier this week, Health Affairs ran a lengthy blog I wrote about how Healthcare.gov incorrectly counts Social Security income for tax dependents who are not required to file taxes. Policy experts and enrollment assisters had suspected the system glitch existed for some time before CMS confirmed the error in early March. Thankfully, the problem is…
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Navigator Grants for OE3 Announced
Today, CMS released the funding opportunity announcement (FOA) for a new round of navigator grants. As noted in my blog earlier this week, these grants will be awarded for a period of three years unlike annual awards in the prior two grant rounds. A total of $67 million will be awarded in the first year,…
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3-Year Navigator Grants Will Provide Stability to Enrollment Assistance
A recent posting of a Paperwork Reduction Act (PRA) notice in the federal register details plans by CMS to tweak navigator entity reporting requirements, which I’ll say more about in a few minutes. But what really excited me about the notice – drumroll please – is that, in the supporting statement, CMS signaled its intent…
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The Affordable Care Act and Entrepreneurship
By Sean Miskell This week, numerous media outlets reported that Senator Ted Cruz may sign up for health coverage through the insurance marketplaces established by the Affordable Care Act (ACA). While the Washington Post calls this development the “irony of all ironies” given Cruz’s seemingly unrelenting opposition to the ACA, this is exactly the kind…
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NHIS Shows Stagnation in Children’s Uninsurance Rates Persists
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) released early estimates from the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) on rates of health coverage in the first three quarters of 2014 (January through September). NHIS estimates provide preliminary evidence of how implementation of major provisions of the ACA – including Medicaid expansion and health insurance exchange marketplaces –…
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Report: Overlap Issuers Could Narrow Coverage Gaps, Mitigate Churn
By Margaret A. Murray, CEO and Jennifer Mcguigan Babcock, VP for Exchange Policy Association for Community Affiliated Plans Last month, our organization – the Association for Community Affiliated Plans (ACAP) – issued a study that found that about 4 in 10 organizations offering coverage through Qualified Health Plans (QHP) in Health Insurance Marketplaces operate a…
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ACA Turns Five: Reflecting on the Past and Looking Forward to the Future
By Sean Miskell Since the Affordable Care Act (ACA) became law five years ago today, health reform has unfolded in fits and starts amid political opposition and staggered implementation of its insurance market reforms and coverage expansions. But as a result of these occasionally frantic first years of implementation, children and families now have improved…
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New Report Finds ACA Had Little Impact on Employer Sponsored Health Plan Enrollment
The Affordable Care Act’s employer mandate on large businesses barely had an impact on enrollment in employer-sponsored health plan enrollment in the past year, according to a new survey released by Mercer, a human resources consulting firm. Between 2014 and 2105, employers reported very little change regarding the average number of full- and part-time workers…
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What’s at stake without a quick, clean renewal of CHIP funding? Our historic success covering kids.
A timely analysis from our friends at the Urban Institute this week quantifies the high stakes of the current deal making around CHIP. The outcome, along with the looming Supreme Court decision, will determine whether we move backwards on our success covering children or maintain the strong system of coverage that has successfully served low-income…
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Confused about What Happens at Tax Time? FAQs on Penalties, Exemptions, Reconciliation, and SEPs:
By Tricia Brooks, Sandy Ahn, Sabrina Corlette, and JoAnn Volk As part of our Robert Wood Johnson Foundation funded work in providing technical assistance to consumer assisters in five states, we are getting a lot of questions about issues related to tax time and health coverage. Here are some of the common questions and answers.…
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Expansions of Medicaid for Pregnant Women Foster Healthy Development into Adulthood
By Sophia Duong and Tricia Brooks In an earlier blog post, we discussed how cutting Medicaid eligibility for pregnant women is a short-sighted policy decision. There are a number of negative consequences that arise in the short-term for pregnant women and newborn babies. And now, we know that there could also be significant long-term consequences.…