The Biden administration has proposed significant changes to the Affordable Care Act’s health insurance marketplaces through the annual “Notice of Benefit & Payment Parameters.” In this second of a three-part series, CHIR’s Megan Houston and Sabrina Corlette review the comments and recommendations that participating health insurers have submitted in response.
In honor of Black History Month, for the February edition of CHIR’s monthly research roundup we reviewed new health policy research centering the experiences of Black people in the U.S. health care system, including structural racism in health care policy, the impact of state Affordable Care Act (ACA) implementation on racial and ethnic minority populations, and trends in coverage, care access, and health outcomes among Black Americans.
In the recently released 2023 “Notice of Benefit & Payment Parameters,” the Biden administration is proposing significant changes to the Affordable Care Act marketplaces. In the first of a three-part series, CHIR’s Emma Walsh-Alker and JoAnn Volk reviewed public comments from multiple consumer advocacy organizations about the impact of the new policies on marketplace beneficiaries. Reviews of comments from insurers and state marketplaces and insurance departments will follow.
Health insurers reported healthy earnings during the fourth quarter of 2021, thanks in large part to publicly funded programs Medicare and Medicaid. CHIR’s Megan Houston reviewed earnings reports for nine major insurers and reports on the key market trends in the health insurance industry.
Unpaid medical bills are among the largest contributors to personal debt in the United States. Evidence indicates that medical debt disproportionately affects people of color and individuals with lower incomes. CHIR’s Maanasa Kona reviews new data from the Census Bureau and state court records that demonstrate the disparate impact of medical debt on vulnerable populations, and explores what policymakers can do to protect consumers from aggressive debt collection.
The ACA requires coverage of recommended preventive services without cost-sharing for consumers enrolled in most private health plans. But even with these protections in place, some insurers improperly impose cost sharing for preventive services. Recently, this problem hit consumers who use pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), a medication that can prevent contraction of HIV.
Under the Affordable Care Act, insurers must provide rebates to enrollees when their spending on clinical services and quality improvement, as a proportion of premium dollars, falls below a minimum threshold. Federal regulators have discovered some insurers are gaming the system by misallocating expenses or inflating their spending on providers. Karen Davenport takes a look at how this practice impacts consumers, and explains a new federal proposal to crack down on it.
Following the Trump administration’s decision to roll back federal network adequacy standards for Affordable Care Act marketplace plans, the Biden administration signaled it will soon resume oversight, proposing new, quantitative standards as well as proactive compliance procedures. In a new post for the Commonwealth Fund’s To the Point blog, CHIR’s Justin Giovannelli examines current state and federal approaches to network adequacy, and what would change under the new standards proposed by the Biden administration.
It is hard to overstate the importance of primary care in ensuring robust health outcomes at the population level. In a new report supported by the National Institute for Health Care Reform, CHIR experts reviewed research to assess whether policy initiatives targeting primary care access have been effective in reducing health care disparities.
In our newest monthly roundup of health policy research, CHIR’s Emma Walsh-Alker reviews studies on the potential of personalized phone outreach to boost marketplace enrollment, trends in the small-group health insurance market, and the Congressional Budget Office’s latest report comparing how much commercial insurers and Medicare pay for health services.
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.
