CHIR expert Christine Monahan recently testified before the Texas House Insurance Committee regarding outpatient facility fee billing. Her research highlights how facility fees contribute to significantly higher healthcare costs. In her testimony, she discussed measures to curtail hospital billing tactics that inflate costs and ways to mitigate financial burdens on patients.
Reinsurance has been a popular mechanism to stabilize insurance markets and reduce premiums. However, some argue that it could negatively affect affordability and enrollment for low-income individuals. In a new article for the State Health & Value Strategies program, Jason Levitis, Sabrina Corlette, and Claire O’Brien review the evidence and discuss considerations for state reinsurance programs.
Since the early 1990s, health care provider consolidation in states like Oregon has led to higher prices, reduced access, and worsened health inequities. In response, Oregon established the Health Care Market Oversight Program in 2022 to review major health care transactions, aiming to ensure they reduce costs and improve care access, especially for underserved populations. While the program has approved most transactions so far, concerns about transparency, resource adequacy, and high profit thresholds for review persist. CHIR’s Nadia Stovicek discusses the need for ongoing evaluation and improvement, and how other states can learn from Oregon.
More hot days mean more hot research! This month we read about the growing divergence between Medicare Advantage bids and payments, the impact of enhanced premium tax credits by race and ethnicity, and about how narrow or broad ACA marketplace physician networks really are.
Earlier this summer, the Biden administration announced updated guidance on medical debt. In a new blog post for the Commonwealth Fund, CHIR faculty, Maanasa Kona, reviews recent state action on medical debt and what this landscape looks like moving forward.
J.D. Vance, candidate for Vice President of the United States, has called for replacing the ACA’s insurance reforms with “high risk pools” for people with pre-existing conditions. CHIR’s Sabrina Corlette revisits how high risk pools worked (or more often, didn’t work) for people, prior to the ACA.
Recently, the U.S. House Education and Workforce Committee approved the Transparency Telehealth Bills Act, which standardizes billing for telehealth services and eliminates extra facility fees, ensuring consumers receive only one bill for their telehealth care. CHIR’s Christine Monahan discusses what this bill means for simplifying costs and protecting consumers from unexpected out-of-pocket expenses.
A debate is looming for the U.S. Congress – whether or not to extend enhanced premium tax credits for Affordable Care Act insurance coverage. In their latest article for Health Affairs, Jason Levitis, Sabrina Corlette, and Claire O’Brien identify several reasons Congress needs to act as soon as possible to preserve coverage and prevent a spike in premiums.
A recently enacted law creates a streamlined pathway to health insurance for individuals who are found ineligible for Medi-Cal but are likely eligible for Marketplace subsidies. In a recent report, CHIR experts assess the critical policy and operational decisions to implement the program and how these choices have affected consumers’ coverage transitions.
As Medicaid unwinding draws to a close, millions of people have had to find new health coverage options, many of them through the Affordable Care Act (ACA) Marketplaces. Emma Walsh-Alker discusses what we know about how they have fared, and whether state efforts to smooth coverage transitions have been successful.
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.
