Although we are in the midst of the second open enrollment period under health care reform, we still don’t have good data on whether people in immigrant families are gaining access to coverage. What we do know suggests we’re making some progress, but that challenges remain. Our Georgetown colleague Sonya Schwartz gets us up to speed.
The Affordable Care Act sets out several requirements for the health insurance marketplaces to encourage insurers to improve quality and deliver better value coverage. Implementation of these provisions has been slowed by the focus on other, more urgent operational priorities, but recent federal rules put plans on notice that quality improvement standards, reporting requirements, and rankings are soon coming their way. Sabrina Corlette has this overview.
There are various routes to getting health insurance coverage for you and your family. One possible option is to have a health savings account (HSA), which must be paired with a high-deductible health plan. In today’s post, Sandy Ahn goes over the basics of a HSA and some things to consider when looking at this option.
Open enrollment in the Health Insurance Marketplaces overlaps this year with many employer plan open enrollment periods, which has prompted some employees to ask questions about how their offer of employer coverage may affect their eligibility for premium tax credits. CHIR’s JoAnn Volk and Sandy Ahn take a look at what consumers need to know, especially if they’re offered a plan that doesn’t offer much coverage.
Understanding how health insurance works can be confusing, particularly when it comes to deductibles, a topic we’ve had a lot of questions about. In today’s post, Sandy Ahn discusses how an embedded deductible works in a health plan for family coverage and compares that to an aggregate deductible. This information is also included in our online Navigator Resource Guide released last month.
December 15th marks the last day by which health insurance marketplace enrollees can actively renew their plans for January 1st start dates. If they take no action, many will be auto-renewed. In a new report, CHIR experts Sabrina Corlette, Jack Hoadley and Sandy Ahn examine the renewal process and share their findings in CHIR’s latest web video.
On December 1, CMS published new guidance on the re-enrollment process for the federally facilitated marketplace. While the guidance is targeted to participating insurance companies, it contains information that is also important to Navigators and others assisting consumers through the re-enrollment process. Sabrina Corlette provides a few key takeaways.
The federal Department of Health and Human Services recently published a proposed regulation that signals some potentially helpful changes to the requirement that health insurers cover a set of essential health benefits. Our colleague at Georgetown University’s Center for Children and Families, Joe Touschner, offers this overview.
Last month CHIR released its Navigator Resource Guide, with background and close to 300 frequently asked questions on key health insurance issues. The Guide now has new content to help consumers navigate the renewal process for 2015. Sabrina Corlette shares some of the highlights.
November 15th marks the start not only of open enrollment into the Affordable Care Act’s health insurance marketplaces, but also of the NAIC’s Fall National Meeting. And many of the same issues on the mind of health insurance consumers are also priorities for state insurance department officials. Sabrina Corlette will be attending the meeting and has this preview.
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.
