It’s finally summer, and during the latest heat wave, the CHIR team cooled off with new health policy research. In June, we reviewed studies on improving race and ethnicity data collection in health insurance marketplaces, the value of health savings accounts, and variation in medical debt accumulation across the U.S.
As private equity involvement in the health care industry increases, policymakers and other stakeholders are sounding the alarm and calling for better regulation to control costs and protect patients. CHIR’s Maanasa Kona takes a look at the role of private equity in the health care sector and how it impacts consumers.
The American Rescue Plan Act has led to record-high marketplace enrollment and significant savings for millions of consumers. But the law’s enhanced marketplace subsidies are set to lapse at the end of the year. In a new post for the Commonwealth Fund’s To the Point blog, Katie Keith explains why there is urgency for Congress to act sooner rather than later.
This month, the CHIR team celebrated the end of the school year with new health policy research. For the latest installment of our monthly research roundup, we reviewed studies on access to providers in Medicaid managed care networks, how the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) affects state cost containment reforms, and the health coverage implications of the Biden administration’s recent changes to the public charge rule for immigrant communities.
Beginning in 2023, CMS will require QHP provider networks for plans sold on the federal marketplace to meet minimum time-and-distance standards and, beginning in 2024, minimum standards for appointment wait times. CHIR joined with colleagues at the Georgetown Center for Children and Families to examine the new marketplace network adequacy standards and how they compare to Medicaid’s standards.
The Biden administration is advancing new standards and policies for the Affordable Care Act health insurance marketplaces, including tougher network adequacy oversight, standardized benefit designs, and new requirements for insurance brokers. In her latest Expert Perspective for the State Health & Value Strategies project, CHIR’s Sabrina Corlette reviews provisions that have particular import for state marketplaces and insurance regulators.
A leaked draft of an impending Supreme Court decision has previewed the potential for states to prohibit and even criminalize abortion. Access to abortion has long been a story of the haves and have-nots. Medication abortion can improve access to this basic health care service, but the delivery and coverage of medication abortion are subject to numerous restrictions and requirements, creating multi-faceted obstacles for patients seeking care. CHIR’s Rachel Schwab looks at several policy actions that can reduce barriers to medication abortion.
The implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) led to historic reductions in racial and ethnic disparities related to health insurance coverage. However, equal access to health coverage is not enough to ensure health equity. In their latest issue brief for the Commonwealth Fund, Dania Palanker and Nia Denise Gooding examine how four state-based health insurance marketplaces have acted to reduce health inequity, and outline considerations for other state-based marketplaces developing a health equity strategy.
The need for mental health and substance use disorder services is substantial and growing. One in five adults in the United States, or 53 million people, had a mental illness in 2020, including 14 million adults who had serious mental illness; forty million adults had a substance use disorder. In response to these troubling trends, policymakers are seeking multi-pronged approaches to provide greater access to services that treat and manage mental health and substance use disorders. CHIR’s JoAnn Volk outlines how both Congress and the Biden administration plan to improve access to behavioral health care.
April brought us a shower of health policy research, including studies on the implications of the American Rescue Plan Act’s (ARP) enhanced premium tax credits (PTCs) expiring for marketplace beneficiaries, how value-based payment models have fared in the commercial health insurance market, and trends in prices that private health plans pay for hospital care across the United States. We took some time away from checking out the cherry blossoms to dig in.
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.
