This May, we explored studies assessing COVID-19’s effect on community health centers, data on racial and ethnic disparities in COVID-19 mortality rates, and changes in health spending and utilization during the crisis.
The COVID-19 pandemic has introduced new challenges for Navigators. To learn more about their experience, and how they are helping consumers manage often unexpected transitions in coverage, CHIR’s Olivia Hoppe talked with six navigators across five states using the FFM to hear how they were faring.
We at CHIR are reeling and taking stock in the wake of the tragic and callous murder of George Floyd, as well as the unsurprising unrest caused by our nation’s longstanding indifference to the pain of communities of color. At CHIR, we spend our professional lives focused on improving people’s access to affordable, high quality health insurance. The work is an honor and we believe we are helping to advance policies that allow more people to get better health care without facing financial ruin.
However, we know we have privileges we too often take for granted and that, at times, have blinded us to well-documented inequities in our health care system. The fact is that we have not thought deeply enough about the longstanding and structural racism that makes it more likely that Black, Hispanic, and Native American/Alaskan Native people are uninsured, more likely to suffer from high out-of-pocket costs, more likely to lack access to providers, and more likely to get poor quality care. We can and must do more. As researchers and policy analysts, we can study the data to better understand the challenges facing communities of color. We can proactively seek out voices in those communities who are documenting and sharing their lived experiences. We can consciously and carefully assess the disparate impacts of policy choices, and work a lot harder to lift up those policies that lift up people of color. We don’t pretend that our efforts to learn about these issues and integrate them into our work in a deeper and more conscious way will make a big difference, but they could make a small difference. What we realize is that these efforts are essential to our mission and values.
We would love to hear from you. If you know of ways in which we can better integrate these important issues into our work and share them with decision makers, please let us know.
As the coronavirus pandemic and economic shutdown continue, the Affordable Care Act’s health insurance marketplaces are an important tool in covering the uninsured. In a new post for the Commonwealth Fund’s To the Point blog, CHIR experts Rachel Schwab, Justin Giovannelli and Kevin Lucia explore how state-based marketplaces have worked to enroll the uninsured during the COVID-19 crisis by creating new opportunities to sign up for coverage and launching outreach campaigns.
As the nation combats the biggest threat to its public health and economy that any of us have seen in our lifetimes, the key to recovery will lie in widespread, universally accessible testing for COVID-19. In a recent blog post for Health Affairs, CHIR’s Sabrina Corlette argues that our traditional, insurance-based model of financing health care services won’t work if we want to use testing to help us get back to work, schools, and community life.
Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, states have taken charge of responding to the public health emergency. As a state that runs its own health insurance marketplace, Idaho has tools at its disposal to help consumers enroll in comprehensive coverage. But like the federal marketplace, Idaho decided not to wield all of them, leaving large marketplace enrollment barriers and instead promoting alternative and less comprehensive coverage.
The $175 billion Provider Relief Fund prohibits participating providers from balance billing COVID-19 patients, regardless of their source of coverage. While this could help many patients avoid surprise medical bills, there remain several questions about the scope of protection this will provide. In an update to his April 30, 2020 post, Georgetown expert Jack Hoadley takes a look at the fine print of the program as well as new guidance from HHS.
The Trump administration has released the annual rule governing insurance standards and marketplace operations under the Affordable Care Act. In an Expert Perspective for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s State Health & Value Strategies project, Sabrina Corlette assesses the implications for state insurance regulation and the state-based marketplaces.
During February’s State of the Union address, President Trump touted his administration’s efforts to expand access to short-term health plans that do not comply with any of the ACA’s consumer protections. Short-term plans are often cheaper than ACA-compliant plans because they can deny coverage to people and exclude entire categories of services. In a recent post supported by The Commonwealth Fund, we reviewed 12 short-term plans to determine what coverage consumers would have if they needed treatment for COVID-19. We found that consumers in short-term plans are likely to have less financial protections than those enrolled in ACA plans.
This April, CHIR’s Olivia Hoppe reviews studies focusing on the relationship between increased unemployment due to COVID-19 and access to health insurance as well as the impact of deferred care on net health care costs.
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.
