…religiously affiliated coverages at play here. One type is “church plan” coverage and the other comes from “health sharing ministries,” which my colleagues and I have already blogged about here and here. They are different creatures, with different regulatory structures. Unfortunately, the effect for consumers could be pretty much the same – an inability to get the protections promised under…
Last year, the AIDS Institute and the National Health Law Program filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office for Civil Rights, alleging that four insurers operating in Florida violated the Affordable Care Act’s provisions prohibiting discrimination on the basis of disability. The AIDS Institute analyzed the prescription drug formularies of all 36 silver-level…
…2016 and is continuous. Enrollees can also go back to the marketplace to update their information, shop and compare plans, or select the same plan. And like last year, consumers that the FFM automatically re-enrolls have the opportunity to change plans or update their information until the end of open enrollment. However, if they do so after coverage begins on…
…associated with offering coverage. Before 2014, employers generally received a “composite rate” from their insurance company. In other words, the insurer tallied up the ages of the employees within a group and gave the employer a total premium amount for the group. Now however, each employee and dependent has a separate premium amount attached to them based on their age….
…staffing table. We identified vacant positions that were not absolutely necessary to fill and could be combined and/or reclassified. Some examples of how we accomplished this are: Several clerical positions were designated for work that could be distributed among two or three staff members without any one of them being overly burdened. Those vacancies were reclassified to combine two clerical…
This week CHIR wishes a fond farewell to our colleague Sally McCarty, a nationally respected expert on health insurance. Sally is retiring from university life, packing up and moving to California with her family. She came to CHIR in 2012 after serving as Director of Rate Review in the Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight (CCIIO), where she wrote…
…pass the laugh/grimace test. It certainly isn’t a serious statutory construction claim. To its credit, the Supreme Court majority kept a straight face as it went through the usual steps of the judicial reading of a statute. They concluded that the term in context was ambiguous, that the structure of the ACA suggested a more comprehensive reading, and that the…
…to the FAQ, the NAIC work group that developed recommendations for the original SBC template (the “B” Committee’s Consumer Information Subgroup) is back at the table debating changes to the revised template. Improving the SBC to make it easier for consumers to compare plans and understand their benefits is no easy task but a necessary one. We have ample data…
…the payment inadequate and send a bill for the balance (i.e., a balance bill). Large balance bills, a common source of medical debt, can be stressful for consumers. Federal law does not protect consumers from balance billing or surprise billing. About one-fourth of all states have policies to address at least some of the scenarios that typically result in unexpected…
…the Alliance website. Commonwealth Fund In the most recent Commonwealth Fund blog post arising from CHIR’s longstanding 50-state monitoring project, Ashley Williams and Sabrina Corlette assess state decisions to allow or disallow mid-sized employers (with 51-100 workers) to delay a move to the small group market. The full post with accompanying state map is available on the Commonwealth Fund’s blog….
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.
