The U.S. House of Representatives’ Ways & Means Committee held a hearing on the individual and employer responsibility requirements in the Affordable Care Act. CHIR’s own Sabrina Corlette was an invited witness and provided testimony on the law’s impact on consumers’ access to affordable, high quality health coverage.
While the ACA has successfully resulted in 16.4 million newly insured people, we don’t yet know a lot about how that new coverage is working for them. However, state consumer assistance programs (CAPs) have the eyes and ears on the ground to help identify problems or gaps in private insurance coverage. Georgetown researchers surveyed 10 state CAPs and found many common issues for consumers’ coverage experiences, pre- and post-ACA.
Recent media articles touted the news that Senator Ted Cruz was planning to sign up for health insurance through one of the Affordable Care Act’s health insurance exchanges. Our colleague Sean Miskell notes that this is an example of the law working as intended, freeing people to pursue their professional hopes and dreams, without fear of losing job-based health coverage.
A new report from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Athenahealth finds that the newly insured under the Affordable Care Act did not result in an influx of new patients for physicians. Current medical student and guest blogger Mason Weber summarizes the main findings of the report, which surveyed approximately 16,000 physicians. He also offers his own perspective as a physician-to-be about the lack of discourse on a physicians’ ability to provide care effectively within the larger healthcare reform debate.
The NAIC Spring meeting tackled a number of ACA implementation issues important to consumers. JoAnn Volk shares some highlights from the meeting.
While open enrollment for 2015 has ended, insurers and marketplaces alike are gearing up for 2016 with federal guidance outlined under the 2016 Letter to Issuers and 2016 Benefits and Payment Parameters Final Rule. Sandy Ahn summarizes some of the changes in store for 2016 health plans that affect consumers.
A new report out from Mercer, a human resources consulting firm, finds that the Affordable Care Act’s employer mandate has had little impact on enrollment in work-based coverage in the past year. Our Georgetown Center for Children and Families colleague, Cathy Hope, takes a look.
A recent conference hosted by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation on health system transparency allowed a diverse group of stakeholders – state and federal regulators, an insurance industry executive, a provider, and CHIR’s own Sabrina Corlette to discuss how the emergence of narrow provider networks on the Affordable Care Act’s marketplaces has spotlighted deficiencies in the information available for consumers to make good plan choices. Sabrina Corlette shares some of the issues debated and discussed.
The Obama administration released a final rule providing the requirements for wraparound coverage to qualify as an excepted benefit. Excepted benefits are generally exempt from the Affordable Care Act market rules and popular with employers who want to offer additional benefits. CHIR’s Sandy Ahn provides a summary of the rule.
The recent financial troubles of some CO-OP plans created under the Affordable Care Act have sparked questions about the long-term viability of the program. In their latest blog post for the Commonwealth Fund, CHIR experts Sabrina Corlette, Kevin Lucia, Justin Giovannelli and Sean Miskell assess the current status of the CO-OP program, challenges to success, and prospects for the future.
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.
