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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
