Marketplace
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The Administration’s New Welcome Mat for Immigrants: “It’s Safe to Apply”
By Dinah Wiley In previous blogs, I’ve described the reluctance of immigrant families to enroll in Medicaid, CHIP, or marketplace insurance and subsidies. The chief worry for a mixed-status household is whether a health insurance application will trigger immigration enforcement, resulting in “removal” (deportation) of a member of the family who would be separated from…
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Policy Cancellations – Another Tempest in a Teapot?
By Sabrina Corlette and Kevin Lucia, Georgetown University Center on Health Insurance Reforms There’s been a lot of breathless journalism lately – with each day’s events apparently a referendum on the success – or failure – of the Affordable Care Act. One of the latest story lines involves people with individual health insurance policies receiving policy…
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Finding Information on 2014 Premiums and Tax Credits
By Joe Touschner As the Administration continues to improve Healthcare.gov, families, consumer assisters, advocates, and others may be looking for other sources of information about what plans will be available through marketplaces in 2014 and what they will cost after taking premium tax credits into account. Fortunately, there are some resources available from HHS and…
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Healthcare.Gov Technical Problems Aside, the Show Must Go On
At the three-week mark, it’s time to admit that the problems with Healthcare.Gov are more than opening day jitters and huge lines at the box office. On one hand, the sheer number and complexity of the business functions that Healthcare.Gov is intended to perform require extremely sophisticated and high-performing software and hardware. On the other…
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How Will Immigrants Fare Under Health Reform? Putting Out the Welcome Mat & Encouraging Enrollment, Part II
By Dinah Wiley In Part I of this blog series, I noted that immigrants have unique concerns about signing up for health insurance, and are less likely than citizens to do so, and that blog addressed confidentiality concerns of immigrant families. The privacy concerns are paramount, yet a mixed-status family will also wonder if they…
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Kaiser Report Finds More Than 5 Million Will Fall Into Coverage Gap Created by States Failing to Expand Medicaid
A federally-funded Medicaid option for more uninsured adults is an important cornerstone of the Affordable Care Act, however, an estimated 5,161,820 uninsured individuals will be left behind because they live in states that have not yet accepted the Medicaid expansion option. Those who fall into the gap earn too much to qualify under their state’s…
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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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New Urban Paper Compares Eligibility for Assistance Across States
By Martha Heberlein Some exciting new state-by-state data from the Urban Institute gives states a better sense of how many people might be eligible for and enroll in the expanded coverage options under the ACA, finding that more than 25 million uninsured are eligible for some sort of assistance securing coverage. As expected, there’s large…
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How Does ACA’s First Week Compare to Medicare Part D’s?
Since the official opening of health insurance marketplaces on October 1, there have been reports of broad interest and high traffic to marketplace websites, but also of various glitches and delays with those websites. Back in the fall of 2005, there was a similar launch for Medicare’s new Part D prescription drug benefit. Does this…
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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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Medicaid.Gov Posts State Profiles, Verification Plans and MAGI Eligibility Levels
Happy open enrollment day! If you are looking for detailed information on your state’s plans for implementing the new streamlined application and ACA eligibility requirements, check out this link, then click on your state. Although some of the information is in progress for some states, it’s great to have a wealth of information in one…
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Thousands Have Already Signed Up for Coverage
I am very excited about the reports coming in– thousands of people have signed up for health coverage already. In Kentucky, a Southern state which has been one of the few to embrace health reform, more than 24,000 people had come to the website of Kentucky’s Healthcare Connection and 1,000 applications had been processed by…
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Multi-State Plans Unveiled
They’re finally here – the Multi-State Plans (MSPs). Intended by Congress to inject new competition into state health insurance markets, the MSP options were unveiled yesterday by the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM). The agency promises that consumers will have more than 150 MSP options in 30 states and the District of Columbia. Within the next four years, there should…
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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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Health Insurance for Immigrant Families
The webinar examines changes in health reform law and regulations that affect the eligibility of immigrants and the access barriers they face, particularly when part of mixed-status families. It also looks at which rules have not changed, showing a snapshot of the landscape of coverage options for immigrant families as of 2013. Download the recording
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Delaying the Individual Mandate is a Bad Idea
The Urban Institute released a handy explainer this week, detailing why proposals to delay the individual mandate are a bad idea. Proponents of such a delay argue that if the Obama Administration delayed the employer mandate, they should also delay the individual mandate. However, unlike the employer mandate, the individual mandate is like a leg on a three-legged stool.…
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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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Narrow Networks: Who’s Looking Out for Consumers?
By Max Farris and Sally McCarty, Georgetown University Center on Health Insurance Reforms Robert Pear’s article in today’s New York Times describes what some see as a trend toward health insurers offering narrow network plans on the federal and state exchanges. Whether consumers will have adequate networks through which they can easily access providers depends on how…
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What Can States Do to Ensure Insurers Don’t Limit Consumer Choice?
This morning, the New York Times ran a front page story headlined: “Lower Premiums to Come at Cost of Fewer Choices“. While I feel for the editors that have to explain such a complex topic in half the characters of a tweet, that headline will certainly trigger a chorus of “I told you so’s” from…
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Medicaid Expansion Round 2: From Simplicity to Complexity
As a practical matter, I think accepting 100% federal funding to extend Medicaid coverage to adults and getting that coverage up and running is easier than setting up a state-based marketplace, implementing the new insurance reforms and tax credits etc etc. States obviously already have Medicaid programs up and running – in many cases with…