As the snow continues to fall, the CHIR team has cozied up indoors with new health policy research. This month, Nia Gooding reviewed studies on rates of enrollment in Marketplace coverage for 2021, Navigator experiences enrolling consumers during the 2021 Open Enrollment period, and outcomes from balance billing arbitration in New Jersey.
Health insurers spent millions to defeat the ACA in 2010. Ten years later, major insurers are joining a growing coalition of supporters working to expand the law. CHIR expert Megan Houston considers why insurers are now embracing the ACA while Democrats now control Congress for the first time since the ACA was passed a decade ago.
Consumers are being bombarded with aggressive and deceptive marketing of short-term and other junk health plans. CHIR’s Maanasa Kona examines what the Biden administration and the Federal Trade Commission can do to help states combat the problem and protect consumers.
President Biden has issued an Executive Order likely to expand the mandate for private insurers to cover, and waive cost-sharing, for COVID-19 testing. However, the Brookings Institution’s Loren Adler and Sabrina Corlette argue in a new blog post for Health Affairs that Congress will also need to act to ensure that the mandate doesn’t encourage price gouging by providers, and to fully eliminate cost barriers to universal testing.
With the approval of the Trump administration, the state of Georgia is poised to upend the Affordable Care Act, abandon HealthCare.gov, and place the coverage of hundreds of thousands of Georgians at risk. In their latest post for the Commonwealth Fund, CHIR’s Justin Giovannelli, JoAnn Volk, and Kevin Lucia evaluate the potential impact of Georgia’s proposed reforms, should they be implemented.
President Joe Biden directed his administration to reopen the federal health insurance marketplace, an action the Trump administration refused to take last year after the COVID-19 pandemic struck due to adverse selection concerns. In a new post for the Commonwealth Fund, CHIR experts discuss how states that created a broad special enrollment period (SEP) for the uninsured in response to the pandemic – and broadcast the opportunity through outreach efforts – saw an increase in younger enrollees, seemingly contradicting claims that reducing SEP barriers inevitably leads to adverse selection.
In the third and final part of our blog series reviewing stakeholder comments on the 2022 Notice of Benefit and Payment Parameters (NBPP), CHIR’s Nia Gooding examines responses from various consumer advocacy organizations and coalitions on some recently finalized proposals.
Open Enrollment has ended in most states, and many consumers have signed up for a health insurance plan offered on the marketplace. In this installation, the CHIR team has compiled a number of frequently asked questions (FAQs) from our Navigator Resource Guide to help inform enrolled consumers on how best to use their coverage.
In one of the Trump administration’s last acts, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services finalized some of the major provisions of the 2022 Notice of Benefit and Payment Parameters. In the second part of our blog series reviewing stakeholder comments, CHIR’s Rachel Schwab takes a look at how state insurance departments and state-based marketplaces responded to some of the recently finalized proposals.
We at CHIR are excited to ring in the New Year with new health insurance research! In December we reviewed studies on health care spending, marketplace subsidies for employer plans, public opinions on a COVID-19 vaccination, and the structure of health plan networks.
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.
