Marketplace
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Administration Stops Risk Adjustment Payments to Insurers: Another Act of Sabotage?
On July 7, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced that it would indefinitely delay making “risk adjustment” payments owed to insurers participating in the individual and small group markets. In the short-run, this would result in many insurers not receiving payments they are expecting this year as scheduled. That would adversely affect these…
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Trump Hits Obamacare Again, Nearly Wiping Out Funds For Outreach
Huffington Post By: Jeffrey Young and Jonathan Cohn The Trump administration’s campaign to undermine the Affordable Care Act notched another achievement Tuesday. This time, the agency that runs the health insurance exchanges is slashing funds for organizations that help people to shop for coverage, forcing the groups to make do with about one-fourth of the federal funding…
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The Tax Bill: Bad News for Marketplaces and Medicaid
The tax bill (H.R. 1, The “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act”) that Congress passed this week is about more than cutting taxes for corporations and high-income individuals, although it is definitely about that. It’s also about cutting health coverage for low-income children and families. The bill’s repeal of the tax penalty for not having health…
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ACA Marketplace Sign-Ups Outpacing Last Year, Despite Sabotage
The 2018 open enrollment period for Affordable Care Act (ACA) marketplace coverage is off to a fast start, with over 600,000 customers selecting plans in the first four days compared to 416,000 during the first five days of last year’s period. We don’t yet know what’s driving the increase and how signups during the open…
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State Oversight in Marketplace Open Enrollment More Important Than Ever
We’re in the midst of open enrollment (OE) for 2018 coverage in the marketplaces, and there’s considerable concern that the many challenges accompanying this OE will result in far fewer people enrolled in coverage. Open enrollment this year will be just half the time of previous open enrollment periods – 6 weeks, beginning November 1st –…
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States Step Up to Protect Consumers in Wake of Cuts to ACA Cost-Sharing Reduction Payments
This post from the Center on Health Insurance Reforms originally appeared on the Commonwealth Fund blog. On October 12, President Trump announced he would discontinue reimbursements to insurance companies for Affordable Care Act (ACA) cost-sharing reduction (CSR) plans offered through the health insurance marketplace. Ending the CSR reimbursements is projected to cost insurers $8 billion…
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Have Questions on Private Health Insurance? Check out Latest Navigator Resource Guide
It’s been a bumpy road for the Affordable Care Act these last few months, but starting November 1, the marketplace is open for enrollment. As the fifth open enrollment season is upon us, we at CHIR have launched our updated and improved Navigator Resource Guide, made possible thanks to a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.…
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It’s Not Time to Give Away Consumer Protections for Cost-Sharing Reduction Reimbursements
A whirlwind of activity following the White House announcement that cost-sharing reduction (CSR) reimbursements would no longer be made has culminated, at least for now, in a bipartisan agreement in the Senate to appropriate the payments for two years. While the legislation negotiated by Senators Alexander and Murray had 24 co-sponsors as of October 19, it is unclear…
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Nationwide Rate of Uninsured Children Reaches Historic Low
Nationwide 95.5 percent of children had health insurance in 2016, up from 95.2 percent the previous year—and up from 92.9 percent in 2013, the year before the ACA was fully implemented. While relatively few children rely on the ACA’s Marketplace for insurance, many gained coverage in Medicaid or CHIP when their parents signed up for…
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New Executive Order: Expanding Access to Short-Term Health Plans Is Bad for Consumers and the Individual Market
On October 12, 2017, President Trump signed a “very major” executive order related to health care that is “going to cover a lot of territory.” The executive order takes steps to roll back a consumer protection related to short-term health plans, in addition to allowing the sale of association health plans that are unregulated by the states and do…
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Trump’s Executive Order: Can Association Health Plans Accomplish What Congress Could Not?
Within days of the failure of the Graham-Cassidy legislation to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act (ACA), President Trump announced that he would likely sign an executive order to allow individuals and small employers to purchase health insurance across state lines through associations. Senator Rand Paul (R–Ky.), among others, has pushed the idea that the Trump administration can accomplish by…
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The Medicaid Expansion is Good for Parents AND Good for Children
Parents and children are more likely to have health coverage now than they were before the Affordable Care Act took effect. The Urban Institute released new research that shows the rate of insurance coverage for parents and children increased significantly between June/September 2013 and March 2017. During the time period, the rate of coverage increased…
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Who Are the Uninsured Adults?
Last week we posted a piece about the shrinking pool of uninsured adults, based on a Health Affairs study showing that the rate of adults without insurance dropped from 16 percent to 7 percent in states that took the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion. Hidden at the end of this Health Affairs study, is a…
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Florida Makes Significant Progress on Children’s Health Coverage But It is at Risk
Our latest brief looks how Florida has cut its rate of uninsured children by more than half since 2009. The rate dropped from 14.8 percent to 6.2 percent in 2016, an all-time low. In raw numbers, that means the state went from having 601,000 uninsured kids to 257,000. Much of that progress can be attributed…
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Graham-Cassidy’s Waiver Program Allows States to Erase Protections for People with Pre-existing Conditions
By Justin Giovannelli, Sabrina Corlette, Kevin Lucia and JoAnn Volk Legislation introduced last week by Republican Senators Lindsey Graham (SC) and Bill Cassidy (LA) goes about the task of repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act (ACA) somewhat differently than the bills previously taken up by the House and Senate, but its approach is no…
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Progress on CHIP Extension Threatened by Graham-Cassidy Repeal Effort
Though we were optimistic about the chances of swift, bipartisan action on CHIP last week, that optimism has waned as the partisan rhetoric around repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act has heated up again. The simple fact of the matter is that you cannot have movement on these two initiatives at once. Unfortunately, the…
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Why CHIP Beats the Marketplace When it Comes to Kids
Over the past few decades, policymakers have made a commitment to insuring children, as evidenced by Medicaid coverage expansions in the 1980s, the creation of CHIP in 1997, and most recently, the Affordable Care Act (ACA). But not all of these coverage sources are created equal. Medicaid, the MVP for children’s coverage, offers children an…
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Marketplace Coverage is Not an Adequate Substitute for CHIP
With the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) set to expire on September 30, some political leaders and policymakers have asked whether the nearly 9 million, low-income children on CHIP could just as easily be covered on Marketplace plans. Our analysis shows that Marketplace plans would cost families more, provide fewer benefits and offer less stability…
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States Take the Lead with Policies to Protect Residents with Chronic Conditions from High Out-of-Pocket Drug Costs
This blog post originally appeared on the Center on Health Insurance Reforms blog. While there were many campaign promises to lower prescription drug costs, to date there’s been little federal action to reduce prescription drug prices or lower patients’ costs. States, however, are taking the lead with policies designed to protect consumers from the high…
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Reduced Funding for Navigators and Public Education Could Harm Nation’s Success in Covering Kids
No smart business stops investing in marketing and customer support when sales are down. But that’s exactly what the Trump administration is doing by cutting funding for advertising and navigators. The recent announcement that CMS is decreasing Healthcare.gov’s direct marketing budget by 90 percent and reducing funding to navigator entities by almost half is shortsighted for…
