Last week, updated federal poverty levels were published in the federal register. Our colleague Tricia Brooks of Georgetown’s Center for Children and Families discusses the implications for consumers in the health insurance marketplaces, Medicaid, and CHIP.
Welcome to 2016. With first votes being cast in the 2016 election cycle less than two weeks away and House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) promising to unveil an ACA replacement plan to steer the 2016 party agenda, the policy debate on health reform is far from over. We here at CHIR are keeping an eye on reform proposals, and in this post, CHIR’s Hannah Ellison examines various proposals to improve affordability of coverage under the ACA.
The failure of 12 of the Affordable Care Act’s CO-OP plans reveals much about the huge barriers facing new companies entering the highly concentrated health insurance market. Sabrina Corlette takes a look at some of the lessons that policymakers – and regulators with oversight over the proposed mergers in the health insurance industry – can draw from the CO-OPs’ experiences.
Health plan consolidation has been in the news lately. The Department of Justice is reviewing proposed mergers between major insurers Aetna/Humana and Anthem/CIGNA, as are a number of state insurance regulators. CHIR’s Emily Curran attended a recent forum airing different perspectives on the mergers, and shares this overview.
Out of frustration with insurance companies, physicians are increasingly turning to direct patient contracting, or “concierge” practices. For some patients these can be a great value, but the spread of these practices could also cause unintended harms. Georgetown medical student Josh Barrett blogs about the pros and cons – and the implications for aspiring doctors – in his latest post for CHIRblog.
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.
