Health care policy debates can often be confusing but the rapidly shifting positions in the latest tempest on Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act are harder to follow than a ping-pong ball. Our colleague at Georgetown’s Center for Children and Families, Adam Searing, attempts to make sense of all the contradictions.
State-based marketplaces created under the Affordable Care Act are contemplating their financial sustainability now that federal grant dollars are no longer available. In their latest blog post for the Commonwealth Fund, CHIR researchers examine the range of state approaches to generating revenue and trimming budgets.
Discussion of new “superwaiver” authority is a hot topic among many state and health policy circles. The Affordable Care Act allows states to modify key reforms beginning in 2017 through a so-called 1332 waiver application. States could also choose to coordinate this waiver with Medicaid and/or CHIP reforms through a 1115 waiver. CHIR’s Sabrina Corlette and Joan Alker of the Center for Children and Families assess the waiver process outlined to date and the need for transparency and stakeholder input on the critical policy decisions that will be required.
The Affordable Care Act (ACA) can take credit for a historic reduction in the number of people uninsured in this country, but it is also often blamed for a wide range of societal ills. Our colleague Sally McCarty notes one particularly egregious attempt to divert attention from bad policymaking by pinning blame on the ACA.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) recently announced that they had fixed a technical glitch in healthcare.gov that may have cost people thousands of dollars in subsidies. Our colleague at Georgetown’s Center for Children and Families, Tricia Brooks, helped to identify the problem early on and offers this take on what CMS can do to help the people affected by the error.
In their latest web video, CHIR researchers JoAnn Volk and Sabrina Corlette discuss the findings from their most recent research report, in which they analyzed consumer experiences with health insurance through the eyes of state consumer assistance programs.
The U.S. Department of Health & Human Services has published the first indications of where it intends to take the Navigator program for the Affordable Care Act’s insurance exchanges. Some new policies could bring some much needed stability to in-person consumer assistance. Our colleague at Georgetown’s Center for Children and Families, Tricia Brooks, has the details.
The U.S. House of Representatives’ Ways & Means Committee held a hearing on the individual and employer responsibility requirements in the Affordable Care Act. CHIR’s own Sabrina Corlette was an invited witness and provided testimony on the law’s impact on consumers’ access to affordable, high quality health coverage.
Recent media articles touted the news that Senator Ted Cruz was planning to sign up for health insurance through one of the Affordable Care Act’s health insurance exchanges. Our colleague Sean Miskell notes that this is an example of the law working as intended, freeing people to pursue their professional hopes and dreams, without fear of losing job-based health coverage.
A new report from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Athenahealth finds that the newly insured under the Affordable Care Act did not result in an influx of new patients for physicians. Current medical student and guest blogger Mason Weber summarizes the main findings of the report, which surveyed approximately 16,000 physicians. He also offers his own perspective as a physician-to-be about the lack of discourse on a physicians’ ability to provide care effectively within the larger healthcare reform debate.
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.
