Marketplace
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In Sickness and in Health: Are Insurers Breaking their Vow to Cover Kids with Pre-existing Conditions?
The wedding date for most provisions of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) may be January 1, 2014 but we’re celebrating the engagement tomorrow, September 23, 2010, when a number of insurance market reforms go into effect for new plans. These early wins for children and families include the end of insurance industry discrimination against children with…
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September 23 Health Care Reforms: Making Insurance Work for Children and Families
September 23rd marks the six-month anniversary of the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA). It also ushers in a new set of insurance reforms that will enable more children and families to obtain and keep their health care coverage. This brief describes the changes as well as a number of strategies…
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Big Stakes for Health Reform in Tomorrow’s Senate Vote
By Edwin Parks, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities The Senate will vote tomorrow on an amendment to small business legislation that would seriously weaken an essential element of the new health reform law — the requirement that individuals obtain health insurance or pay a penalty — and eliminate preventive care funding aimed at reducing…
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Many Patient’s Bill of Rights Provisions Go Into Effect on September 23rd
September 23rd will mark the six-month milestone for the Affordable Care Act and several provisions impacting children and families will go into effect on that date including provisions in the “Patient’s Bill of Rights” which: Prohibit employer or new individual health plans from excluding coverage of specific benefits associated with a pre-existing condition for any…
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Since You’ve Been Gone …
Having spent much of the summer in South America and without much access to American media, I was curious to see how things had changed when I returned to work this week. Hmmm. Not so good. Controversy over the health reform bill seems as rhetoric laden and inflammatory as ever as the election approaches. That…
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California is Blazing a Trail on Establishing Health Insurance Exchange Under ACA
By Mike Odeh (Children Now) and Kristen Golden Testa (The Children’s Partnership) with the 100% Campaign And we’re off! Implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) is officially underway! Less than six months after Congress passed the ACA, California has blazed the trail as the first state in the nation to create a statewide Health Insurance…
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HHS Listening Session Promotes Transparency & Provides Rich Dialogue With Stakeholders
By Jocelyn Guyer It used to be that late August in Washington, D.C. was the perfect time to clean the junk out of your office, delete old emails, and go to the dentist. Now, though, the high energy folks in the Obama Administration charged with implementing health reform are bringing yet more change to Washington,…
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Health Insurance Exchanges: New Coverage Options for Children and Families
A key feature of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) is state-based “exchanges.” These new health insurance marketplaces are designed to provide uninsured (and in some cases underinsured) individuals and small businesses with the ability to purchase affordable health insurance coverage for themselves and their employees respectively. States that establish and operate exchanges…
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Exchanges are Critical to Success of Affordable Care Act
Health care “exchanges” are critical to fulfilling the promise of the Affordable Care Act and how states decide to meet their responsibility to establish them will have an enormous impact on children and families. Today, the Department of Health and Human Services is hosting a stakeholder conference to discuss exchanges. To coincide with the conference, my colleagues,…
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Three Cheers for Dependent Coverage Expansion!
By Patrick Tigue, New England Alliance for Children’s Health While there are many provisions in the Affordable Care Act (ACA) that will benefit children and families, the expansion of dependent coverage to children up to age 26 is among the most important – especially in the short-term. In 2011 alone, as many as 1.64 million…
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CCF & Kaiser Identify Key Issues for Policymakers to Consider for Newly Eligible Medicaid Beneficiaries
Under the Affordable Care Act, states will have considerable flexibility, within federal guidelines, to design Medicaid benefit packages and cost-sharing rules that are appropriate for newly-eligible adult beneficiaries. The often-extensive health care needs and very low incomes of the newly-eligible adults are important considerations for states as they put the new law into effect, according…
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Home Visiting Program – Another Early Win for Children in Affordable Care Act
By Tom Birch, National Child Abuse Coalition For the first time, with the passage of health care reform in March, federal funding will be available to states to support a range of voluntary home visitation services to pregnant women, young parents and their children, designed to improve maternal and child health, foster healthy child development,…
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Study Concludes That Medicaid Retention Among Children Has Improved
One of the many lessons learned about advancing children’s health coverage is how critical retention in Medicaid and CHIP is to our coverage goals. Dr. Benjamin Sommers drove this point home in a study that concluded that one-third of all eligible, uninsured children in 2006 had actually been enrolled in Medicaid or CHIP in the prior…
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$51 Million Available for Designing State Exchanges
By Martha Heberlein HHS announced today that up to $1 million per state will be available in grants to begin establishing health insurance exchanges. This first round of grants is designed to help cash-strapped states conduct the research and planning necessary to build the new marketplaces. Grant applications are available at: http://www.healthcare.gov/center/grants and are due…
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Consumer Assistance: A Guided Tour to Your New Health Care Choices
By Christine Barber, Community Catalyst We’ve all heard the recently-passed Affordable Care Act (ACA) provides a lot of new opportunities for improving health care coverage and access – but we also hear most Americans don’t understand what the law actually means for them. At Community Catalyst, we think a major opportunity created by national health…
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Bumps in the Road for Kids’ Coverage
By Sabrina Corlette, Georgetown Health Policy Institute In the last couple of weeks there have been reports that some insurance companies have decided they will no longer market “kids-only” policies, in response to the new requirement under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) that they issue coverage to all children, even those with pre-existing…
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CCF Comments to NAIC on Exchange Coordination with Medicaid and CHIP
CCF Comments to NAIC on Exchange Coordination with Medicaid and CHIP
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What will this cost us – continued…
By Martha Heberlein Since the last time we talked about state estimates of the cost of health reform, several more have put them out. A few, in particular, struck me – Maine, Maryland, and Wisconsin. Why, you might ask? Because these three states found that health reform would save them money. John Holahan of the Urban…
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HHS Rule on Preventive Services: Bright Futures For All Children
By Judith S. Palfrey, MD, FAAP President, American Academy of Pediatrics On Wednesday, I was honored to attend an event in DC unveiling the US Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) Interim Final Rule on preventive services under health reform. To so many of us in the business of taking care of children, the…
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New Reg Aims to Make Preventive Health Services More Accessible, Affordable
“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” It is not often that I find myself quoting Benjamin Franklin, but it seems particularly apropos this week with the release of the latest Affordable Care Act regulation. On Wednesday, the Obama administration issued new rules requiring that health plans provide a series of expert-recommended preventive…