On July 16 the Obama Administration published guidance for insurers in the federally facilitated marketplaces (FFMs) regarding a requirement that they provide a 90-day grace period to policyholders who fail to pay premiums. Sabrina Corlette reviews the new rules and offers some advice for consumers who might find themselves in this situation.
It’s getting to be a summer tradition: a new set of court decisions on the Affordable Care Act. This past week two courts reached opposite conclusions on whether the IRS can issue subsidies through the federally facilitated marketplaces, affecting potentially 7.3 million people. Research Fellow Sandy Ahn talks about these decisions and their impact on the ACA’s ability to address the “three As” of health coverage: access, affordability, and adequacy.
Today, Out2Enroll—a nationwide campaign dedicated to connecting LGBT people with their health insurance coverage options—released a new report exploring the extent to which this year’s outreach and enrollment efforts met the needs of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community. Katie Keith provides an overview of the report’s major findings in this guest post.
Last week the state of Washington finalized rules banning insurers from imposing benefit-specific waiting periods on policyholders. Sandy Ahn, a new Research Fellow at CHIR, reviews the rule and how it’s likely to affect consumers.
One of the key consumer protections in the Affordable Care Act is the requirement that plans must have a limit on out-of-pocket costs. However, there are limits on the limit, and the details matter. Consumers who need a non-formulary drug run smack into one of those limits, but they have options to get the drugs they need as a covered benefit. JoAnn Volk provides a run down.
Washington DC’s NBC affiliate wanted a status report on the Affordable Care Act, 6 months after full implementation. They turned to one of CHIR’s ACA experts, Sabrina Corlette, for a look at the law’s successes to date, as well as challenges ahead.
This July the Georgetown University Law Center’s O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law is offering its first-ever summer program on the Affordable Care Act. The week long program promises a deep dive look at the legal and policy implications of the law and its implementation. Program co-director Sabrina Corlette shares a sneak peek at the faculty and agenda.
Now that open enrollment into the new health insurance marketplaces has ended, options for consumers seeking to change plans are more limited, even for those enrolled in plans that don’t cover essential health benefits, such as maternity services. Sabrina Corlette tackles one such situation in her latest blog post.
While narrow provider networks are by no means new to health insurance, the practice has received renewed attention as plans participating in the marketplaces turn to network design to keep premium costs low. While consumers benefit from more affordable insurance, overly narrow networks can risk the quality of care consumers receive and increase their out-of-pocket costs. In this blog post originally published by Health Affairs, CHIR’s Sabrina Corlette and JoAnn Volk and the Urban Institute’s Robert Berenson and Judy Feder discuss the cost-access trade-offs for consumers and offer a few recommendations for policymakers.
Now that open enrollment into the new health insurance marketplaces is over, the only way people can enroll in marketplace coverage is by qualifying for a special enrollment period because of a life change such as a birth, marriage, a move, or a divorce. Healthcare.gov recently made available a new “screener tool” to help consumers determine whether they qualify. CHIR’s Sabrina Corlette took the new tool for a test drive and has a few suggested improvements.
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.
