The Trump administration is expected to reverse federal limitations on short-term insurance, which does not have to comply with Affordable Care Act rules like preexisting condition protections. In their latest post for the Commonwealth Fund’s To the Point blog, CHIR’s Dania Palanker, Kevin Lucia, Sabrina Corlette, and Maanasa Kona examine how ten states currently regulate the short-term insurance market.
Earlier this month, the Trump Administration issued a proposed regulation that would allow individuals and small employers to more easily purchase health insurance across state lines through professional or trade associations. In their latest post for the Commonwealth Fund’s To the Point blog, CHIR’s Kevin Lucia and Sabrina Corlette examine the proposal’s impact on consumers and insurance markets, and discuss implications for state regulatory autonomy.
In a recent brief for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s State Health & Value Strategies program, CHIR’s Sabrina Corlette provides an overview of proposed federal rules expanding the availability of association health plans and assesses the implications for state insurance regulation.
Heading into open enrollment for 2018 marketplace coverage, experts predicted far fewer people would sign up for coverage. Despite the obstacles working against a successful open enrollment, sign-ups came close to last year’s tally: federally facilitated marketplaces (FFMs) logged 8.8 million plan selections, including close to 2.5 million new consumers, by the close of open enrollment on December 15th, nearing the 9.2 million plan selection from the previous year in just half the time. CHIR’s Olivia Hoppe and JoAnn Volk take a look at what explains the better-than-expected results.
Recent research highlights how health insurance coverage eases financial pressure on families’ budgets, particularly for low-income families. Karina Wagnerman from our sister center, the Center for Children & Families, highlights the findings from two key studies.
A reliable indicator of health insurance markets’ stability is insurer participation, including the number of insurers that elect to sell individual plans and whether they participate over subsequent years. In a recent analysis for the Commonwealth Fund, CHIR experts looked at insurer participation in the state-based Affordable Care Act (ACA) marketplaces from 2014 to 2018, which sheds light on how state marketplaces have maintained competition despite uncertainty about the law’s future.
Last year brought a lot of surprises in health care policy, and 2018 is shaping up to be more of the same. Here health insurance experts at CHIR, including Sabrina Corlette, Kevin Lucia, JoAnn Volk, Justin Giovannelli, and Dania Palanker share the policies and market trends that they’ll be watching in the year to come.
Blink and you may have missed it – open enrollment for HealthCare.gov was much shorter this year and ended on December 15th. But many people will have extra time to sign up if they’re in a plan that’s being discontinued. CHIR’s Sandy Ahn answers some frequently asked questions about consumers’ options if they’re in this circumstance.
The Alexander-Murray bill to fund the Affordable Care Act’s cost-sharing subsidies could be included in an end-of-year budget deal. It includes provisions requiring states to make some quick decisions on an issue that many may have thought was put to bed. CHIR’s Justin Giovannelli provides an overview of what states may need to do, and when, if Alexander-Murray passes.
New rules are due any day now in response to President Trump’s October 13, 2017 executive order to expand access to short-term limited-duration health plans that don’t have to comply with Affordable Care Act protections. The impact of the proposed new rules were debated at the National Association of Insurance Commissioners’ December meeting, as well as potential state policy options to protect consumers and stabilize their markets. CHIR recently outlined some in an issue brief, and we share some highlights here.
The opinions expressed here are solely those of the individual blog post authors and do not represent the views of Georgetown University, the Center on Health Insurance Reforms, any organization that the author is affiliated with, or the opinions of any other author who publishes on this blog.
