Marketplace
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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…
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The Doctor Is In
Doctor Donald M. Berwick, a respected Harvard professor and pediatrician who has built a reputation for improving quality and reducing health care costs, was sworn in this week as administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. The agency had been without a permanent administrator since 2006. Dr. Berwick was installed in the CMS…
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A Deeper Look at Individual Responsibility Requirement
By Jocelyn Guyer Community Catalyst and Georgetown’s CCF have just finished up a piece that explores in detail the way that the new individual responsibility requirement will work. With all of the controversy and rhetoric surrounding the requirement, it seemed a good time to take an objective, detailed look at how it will actually work. …
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The New Responsibility to Secure Coverage: Frequently Asked Questions
The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) includes a much-discussed requirement that people secure health insurance coverage for themselves and their children. This “individual responsibility requirement” is an essential element of the new law, which will play a vital role in increasing the number of people with health insurance and make it possible to…
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Massachusetts Isn’t the Only State with Health Reform Experience
While there is much work to be done implementing the many facets of the health reform, creating the exchange marketplace(s) is one of the tasks that receives much of the attention. Not only is it a new concept to most states but, along with the expansion of Medicaid, it is the mechanism for insuring the…
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Maryland Leaders Getting Jumpstart on Health Reform Implementation
By Vincent DeMarco, President, Maryland Citizens’ Health Initiative Education Fund,Inc. Unlike other states where the fight over federal health care reform continues, leaders in Maryland are figuring out how to make comprehensive health care a reality here at home. We want to make sure that Maryland gets every federal dollar it can under the new…
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Implementing Health Care Reform: Key Questions for States
Under health care reform, the federal government is tasked with establishing the framework under which many provisions of the law are implemented. Within this framework, though, state policymakers will make many key decisions and serve as critical partners in the implementation process. States must begin planning soon for the bulk of reforms that go into…
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Colorado Acting Boldly on Health Reform Implementation
By Gretchen Hammer, Colorado Coalition for the Medically Underserved and Ashlin Spinden of Metro Area for People Colorado Governor Bill Ritter, Jr. has a new health care mantra: “Because we didn’t wait for Washington, Colorado is now one of the best-positioned states in the nation to effectively implement health care reform.” Governor Ritter has made…
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What Does My Grandfather Have to Do with It? New Rules on Applying Health Reform Protections Across Health Plans
Under the health care reform law, employer health plans or those on the individual market in existence on March 23 (when the legislation was signed by President Obama) have been exempted from some, but not all, of the insurance reforms in the bill. This “grandfather” provision is a critical component of health care reform because…