In their latest piece for the Commonwealth Fund’s To the Point blog, Jack Hoadley, Beth Fuchs, and Kevin Lucia assess the end-of-year flurry of congressional proposals to protect consumers from surprise balance billing, as well as prospects for future compromise.
The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals is expected to rule soon on the future of the Affordable Care Act in the Texas v. U.S. case. In their latest post for the Commonwealth Fund’s To The Point blog, CHIR’s Sabrina Corlette and Emily Curran evaluate whether states can protect their residents from the fallout, particularly for those with pre-existing conditions, and provide an update on the latest state efforts.
States are warning consumers of fraud and about the inadequate nature of some insurance products being sold that masquerade as health coverage. Over the last year, we identified alerts or press releases issued by 15 states warning consumers to be on their guard against deceptive marketing pitches for these products. In their latest post for the Commonwealth Fund’s To The Point blog, CHIR experts spoke with regulators in five of these states to better understand what was behind these warnings and get insight into potential pitfalls for consumers.
This year has seen a flurry of state-level action to protect patients from surprise balance billing. In their latest post for the Commonwealth Fund’s To the Point blog, CHIR’s Jack Hoadley, Kevin Lucia and Maanasa Kona take a closer look at the latest set of state bills to tackle the issue. They find that lawmakers’ approaches to solving this problem are evolving.
Last week, Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf signed legislation to establish a state-based health insurance marketplace. Recently, along with Pennsylvania, several states have taken steps towards transitioning to their own marketplace and enrollment platform. In their newest post for the Commonwealth Fund’s To the Point blog, CHIR’s Rachel Schwab and JoAnn Volk review the latest state actions to transition to a state-run platform and break down some of the incentives for states to leave the federal marketplace.
Since implementation of the Affordable Care Act, insurer participation in the ACA marketplaces has fluctuated. As states prepare to enter their annual rate review processes for 2020, CHIR’s Emily Curran and Justin Giovannelli interviewed officials in seven of the state-based marketplaces to understand their strategies for maintaining insurer participation in 2019 and ensuring marketplace competition in the future.
Short-term plans are now being sold to consumers as a replacement for Affordable Care Act (ACA) coverage. However, because these plans are exempt from many consumer protections and ACA rules, a number of states have stepped up to regulate the design and marketing of these plans. In their latest issue brief for The Commonwealth Fund, CHIR experts document recent state action to regulate short-term plans and protect their residents and markets.
During the last open enrollment period, the Affordable Care Act’s marketplaces faced a number of headwinds, including federal policy changes predicted to curb enrollment. Given myriad obstacles to enrollment efforts, it came as no surprise that overall marketplace plan selections dropped slightly this year. But a deeper dive into enrollment trends reveals that most state-based marketplaces outperformed the federally facilitated marketplace. In a new post for the Commonwealth Fund’s To the Point blog, CHIR’s Rachel Schwab and Sabrina Corlette unpack data from the recent open enrollment period to see how the marketplaces performed during a turbulent time, finding that certain policy and operational decisions were associated with better results.
Recent federal guidance made significant changes to the ACA’s section 1332 waiver program in order to give states greater leeway to sidestep ACA rules. But the move has triggered questions about whether the waiver options the Trump administration is touting are practical for states, or even legal. In a new work for The Commonwealth Fund, Justin Giovannelli and JoAnn Volk examine how states are approaching ACA waivers in the wake of the federal policy change.
The expansion of short-term policies has raised concerns that they may be deceptively marketed, with some sellers leading consumers to believe they are buying a comprehensive policy when they are not. While twenty-four states have sought to regulate short-term plans, their efforts may be undermined by a loophole that allows the policies to be sold through out-of-state associations – a practice we found to be quite common.
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.
