Marketplace
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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…
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Lots of Questions but Few Answers: NAIC’s 2017 Summer Meeting
Originally posted on CHIRblog. For those who follow the fate of the Affordable Care Act marketplaces, it’s hard to escape the daily reports of the status of federal funding for cost-sharing reductions(CSR), the subsidies that lower out-of-pocket costs for low-income marketplace enrollees. The Trump administration won’t commit to funding the reimbursements to insurers for the rest of 2017…
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Federal Funding Expiration Has Utah Health Groups Concerned
KUER By Erik Neumann September 30th marks the end of the federal government’s fiscal year. Local healthcare advocates are concerned because it’s the time when federal funding for two health programs in Utah is set to expire. …. Jessie Mandle is a Senior Health Policy Analyst at Voices for Utah Children. “Just given the overall…
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New Pediatric Quality Core Measure Set Released by Collaborative of Public and Private Payers
About a year and a half ago, CMS, commercial health plans, Medicare and Medicaid managed care plans, purchasers, physician and other health-related professional groups, and consumers teamed up to reach consensus on core quality measures that would be reported across payers in the public and private sectors. The initiative, known as the Core Quality Measures…
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Unexpected Defeat of Repeal Bill Doesn’t Mean End of Threats to ACA Health Coverage
In the wake of the surprise defeat of the Senate’s effort to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act (ACA), President Trump tweeted: “As I said from the beginning, let ObamaCare implode, then deal. Watch!” The Trump administration does in fact have considerable ability to undermine and even “implode” the ACA’s insurance marketplaces, independent of Congress.…
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Insurer Q2 Earnings Reports Being – How Will Companies React to Federal Uncertainty?
By Emily Curran, Georgetown University Center on Health Insurance Reform On July 18, Unitedhealthcare reported its second quarter (Q2) financial earnings, kicking off the Q2 cycle in which health insurers will announce their quarterly results, detail major financial gains and losses, and provide insight into how they expect to perform over the following quarter. While the audience…
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States at Risk = Children and Families at Risk
It is a truth universally acknowledged that states don’t get sick, people get sick. But in a program like Medicaid, where the federal government and the states share in the cost of medical and long-term care services that people need, the fiscal fortunes of states and the health of beneficiaries are inextricably linked. If the…
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Nation’s Progress on Children’s Health Coverage Imperiled
On November 9th I blogged about what the election results could mean for child and family coverage. As readers of Say Ahhh! know, the nation made extraordinary progress in reducing the rate of uninsured children to under 5%, This progress is thanks to Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), and the Affordable Care Act (ACA). All three…
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Medicaid: Welcoming Americans with Pre-existing Conditions since 1965
The White House and the Republican Leadership in the House are continuing to look for enough votes to pass a bill to “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act (ACA). A number of Republican Members opposed to the bill have expressed specific concern about new amendment that would allow states to undo the ACA’s protections…
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The Affordability Equation: The Conversation about ACA Subsidies Must Consider Premiums and Cost Sharing at the Same Time
By Hilary Dockray, Social Interest Solutions As the debate about the Affordable Care Act (ACA) continues – Repeal? Replace? Repair? – it is important to remember that the ACA was designed to work as a whole and that disassembling pieces of it would be unwise. But the national conversation continues to deal separately with two…
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What’s at Stake if Essential Health Benefits are Scrapped? Pediatric Benefits, Protection from Lifetime Limits
As House leaders scramble to get enough votes to send the American Health Care Act to the Senate, there is a lot of horse-trading going on. None of it to the benefit of kids enrolled in Medicaid or private insurance. The most recent Affordable Care Act provision on the chopping block is the Essential Health…
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Eliminating Essential Health Benefits Will Shift Financial Risk Back to Consumers
Congress is debating the American Health Care Act, a plan to repeal and replace parts of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). The Act does not make changes to the Essential Health Benefits (EHB), ten categories of coverage that all new plans in the individual and small group markets must include in their plans. But the…
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CHIR Expert Testifies Before the House Committee on Small Business Regarding Enhancements to the ACA
By Emily Curran and Dania Palanker, originally posted on CHIRblog On February 7, the House Committee on Small Business held a hearing titled, “Reimagining the Health Care Marketplace for America’s Small Businesses,” to discuss the challenges small businesses are facing in the health insurance marketplaces and to offer potential solutions for the next phase of…
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Affordable Care Act Repeal Efforts Would Impact State Laws, Too
By Kevin Lucia and Katie Keith, originally posted on CHIRblog With much of the attention over ACA repeal efforts focused on Washington DC, it’s easy to forget that repeal-and-replacement efforts would significantly affect state approaches to insurance regulation. This is especially true in the 32 states and D.C. that have adopted state-level ACA protections. While…
