We at CHIR are excited to announce that Dania Palanker, a nationally recognized expert on private insurance and benefit design, joined our team this week. Dania brings with her more than 15 years of health policy experience from her roles at the National Women’s Law Center (NWLC) and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). While serving as Senior Counsel at…
…as a result of reduced competition – hence the Justice Department’s lawsuits against the companies. Insurers aren’t the only component of the health market that just seem to be getting larger – providers are trending towards consolidation as well. Between 2010 and 2014, there were over 450 hospital mergers and now many urban areas only have between 1 and 3…
…While these marketplaces provide employers with a new avenue for offering coverage to their workers, some states are questioning whether state-run SHOPs make sense. In a new blog published by The Commonwealth Fund, CHIR experts Emily Curran, Sabrina Corlette, and Kevin Lucia examine enrollment trends, analyze insurer participation, and comment on future prospects for this element of health care reform….
By Justin Giovannelli, Kevin Lucia, and Sabrina Corlette Health insurance plans with limited networks of providers are common on the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) health insurance marketplaces. The ACA’s consumer protections, along with online marketplace platforms that encourage insurers to compete on price, have led to a trend in health plan design that combines a comparatively low premium with a…
…enrollment and consumer assistance during the most recent open enrollment season. To do so, we asked marketplace officials to complete a confidential questionnaire that sought to identify what assistance and outreach strategies they viewed as most effective and what factors they identified as exerting important influence on sign-ups, positively and negatively. To learn what strategies states employed, check out our…
…setting participation rules, which encourage competition among insurance companies in an exchange, demonstrating that states have the ability to stabilize their marketplaces Looking beyond the UHC announcement to other large, publicly traded insurers reveals a number of success stories: Aetna reported higher-than-expected enrollment, and expressed that they are “in a very good place” in regards to marketplace participation. Molina experienced…
…CO-OPs. CO-OPs have also suffered under the ACA’s risk adjustment program, largely because they lack the data collection and analytical capacity of their more established competitors. Collecting and understanding the data about the health status of enrollees is critical to putting a company’s best foot forward in this program. This lack of data infrastructure has likely contributed to the CO-OPs’…
…telemedicine continues to transform how we access care, states will be pushed to change their approaches to regulatory oversight as well, particularly with network adequacy. While most states appear to be silent on how telemedicine can be used for network adequacy purposes, the time for action may come sooner than later as more consumers, providers, and insurers embrace the use…
…help consumers make apples-to-apples comparisons among health plans and facilitate enrollment in a plan that is optimal for their health and financial situation. To assess whether and how this goal is being met, CHIR researchers conducted an analysis of policy guidance, consumer-facing marketplace websites, and interviews with state officials and key stakeholders in four SBM states: Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York…
…is no longer directly enforcing federal law in Alabama – the state Department of Insurance has committed to reviewing insurance plans for compliance with the ACA and other federal health laws. It also now joins the ranks of states with an “effective rate review program.” The ACA is not alone among major federal health laws. Slow and gradual state implementation…
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.
