State of the States: Choosing an Essential Health Benefits Benchmark Plan

To help make coverage more comprehensive, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) requires insurers to cover a minimum set of health insurance benefits, known as “essential health benefits.” JoAnn Volk and Max Levin provide an update on how many states have selected their essential health benefits benchmark plan and help translate what it means for consumers.

Summary of Benefits and Coverage: Helping Consumers Shop for Health Insurance

As of September 23, consumers will begin to receive a new summary of benefits and coverage form that describes what's covered by their insurance policy. Sabrina Corlette welcomes these new forms and discusses how they were developed as well as their potential to help tame the “wild west” of shopping for health insurance coverage.

Waiting for 2014: One Family's Story

Thanks to the support of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, CHIRblog will feature profiles of everyday people across the country who will – or have already – benefited from new consumer protections under the Affordable Care Act. Sabrina Corlette tells us about Joshua and his family's struggle to obtain affordable, quality insurance that will cover the care he needs for his heart syndrome in the first personal story in our new series, “Real Stories, Real Reforms.”

The Top Three Questions on Multi-State Plans

With the deadline looming for comments on the Office of Personnel Management's (OPM) recent proposed rule implementing the Multi-State Plan Program, Christine Monahan poses three key questions stakeholders are thinking about.

New Report Finds Patients Pay for Confusion Over Colonoscopy Screening

Today, the Kaiser Family Foundation—in partnership with CHIR, the American Cancer Society, and the National Colorectal Cancer Roundtable—released a new report exploring how private insurers are applying cost-sharing for colorectal cancer screening, such as colonoscopies. Kevin Lucia, one of the report's authors, discusses what the findings mean for this new benefit under the Affordable Care Act.

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.