Under the Affordable Care Act, new rules for counting household size and income for purposes of Medicaid and CHIP eligibility were aligned with the calculation of Marketplace subsidies. Following up on a primer she drafted on the basics of MAGI, our colleague at Georgetown’s Center for Children and Families, Tricia Brooks, drills down on income eligibility for Medicaid, CHIP, and premium tax credits.
The media furor over health plan cancellations in the wake of the Affordable Care Act has died down, in part because federal and state rules now allow insurers to maintain their noncompliant policies until 2017. However, some insurers are choosing to discontinue them. In their latest blog post for the Commonwealth Fund, Kevin Lucia, Sabrina Corlette, and Ashley Williams examine the policy and business incentives driving health plan cancellations.
As consumers shop for health insurance, many may be offered coverage, such as “excepted benefit” plans or short-term, limited duration policies that fall outside of the protections required in the Affordable Care Act. CHIR’s Kayla Connor shares a primer on these policies, published by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s State Health Reform Assistance Network.
Health insurance agents and brokers drove a significant portion of enrollment into the Affordable Care Act’s marketplaces in the first year, and continue to play an important role this year. In an issue brief released this week by Georgetown’s Center on Health Insurance Reforms and the Urban Institute, researchers document some of the early barriers to more robust broker engagement with the marketplaces, as well as opportunities for more effective partnerships in the future. Sabrina Corlette has this overview.
CHIR faculty who provide technical assistance to states through Robert Wood Johnson’s State Health Reform Assistance Network have updated their ACA Consumer Services Manual with timely information about premium tax credits and the reconciliation process. Sally McCarty describes the updates here.
Congress is debating controversial legislation to shift the Affordable Care Act’s definition of full-time work from 30 hours to 40 hours per week. CHIR’s Mason Weber digs into the research on what such a move could mean for workers and employers.
Some employer health plans have begun to respond to dramatic differences in the cost of medical procedures through reference pricing. CHIR’s Kayla Connor shares a new primer prepared for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s State Health Reform Assistance Network that helps insurance regulators understand the latest federal rules on reference pricing and potential consumer protection issues.
Your employer may want to help you meet your New Year’s resolutions to lose weight or get fit by providing you with some financial incentives. JoAnn Volk takes a look at the current state of workplace wellness programs and recent action at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).
Two state insurance regulators, Florida and Montana, have taken recent regulatory action to address concerns raised by advocacy groups about the way specialty drugs are covered in pharmacy benefit plans offered in their states. Sally McCarty provides details of those actions and related updates on the oversight of discriminatory benefit designs.
While the ACA limits the power of insurance companies to charge higher prices to consumers based on health status and other factors, the law doesn’t stop insurers from imposing a premium surcharge on tobacco users that can raise the cost of coverage by as much as 50 percent. In a new blog post for the Commonwealth Fund, CHIR researchers discuss the pros and cons of tobacco rating and examine why some states have chosen to ban the practice.
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.
