In a new post for the Commonwealth Fund’s To the Point blog, Katie Keith highlights several Affordable Care Act requirements that have not been fully utilized by insurers — resulting in gaps that exacerbate disparities. The post identifies examples where insurers and regulators could do more to turn commitment on health equity and racial justice into action.
The Biden administration has released its first major set of proposed rules governing the Affordable Care Act marketplaces. In her latest Expert Perspective for the State Health & Value Strategies project, CHIR’s Sabrina Corlette assesses the implications for state-based marketplaces and insurance regulators.
This Mother’s Day, CHIR’s Rachel Schwab and Nia Gooding assessed the potential impact of a new legal challenge to the Affordable Care Act (ACA) for women. Judge Reed O’Connor has recently allowed a challenge to the ACA’s preventive services coverage provision to move forward in a U.S. district court. Invalidating this provision could jeopardize access to a broad set of preventive services for millions of women.
April’s latest health policy research is provided by CHIR’s Nia Gooding in our monthly roundup. She reviews studies on demographic characteristics of the people who fall into the ACA family glitch, trends in contraceptive use among women enrolled in high-deductible health plans after the passage of the ACA, and state policy considerations given the American Rescue Plan’s premium tax credit expansions.
The “family glitch,” a loophole in federal rules, bars millions of people from subsidized coverage because they have access to a family member’s employer-sponsored coverage The glitch is easy to fix, through either regulation or legislation. CHIR exposes that a paper released this week claiming a fix is illegal and harmful is based on a faulty presumption.
The family glitch bars millions of people from accessing reduced premiums and cost-sharing through the marketplaces because a family member has an offer of employer coverage. In their latest post for the Commonwealth Fund To the Point blog, Christina Goe and CHIR’s Dania Palanker delve into the costs of the family glitch to low- and middle-income families.
April is Minority Health Month, a good time to consider ways to reduce the wide disparities in health insurance access and coverage that particularly affect people of color. For the National Latino Week of Action, CHIR looks at changes in the uninsured rate among the Latino/Hispanic community, and identifies opportunities to build on coverage gains thanks to the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021.
In the spirit of Valentine’s Day, this February CHIR’s Nia Gooding reviewed some lovely studies on trends in the uninsured population, the impact of Medicaid expansion on coverage rates and healthcare access among young adults, and the effect that cost-sharing has on patient behavior and health outcomes.
Open Enrollment has ended in most states, and many consumers have signed up for a health insurance plan offered on the marketplace. In this installation, the CHIR team has compiled a number of frequently asked questions (FAQs) from our Navigator Resource Guide to help inform enrolled consumers on how best to use their coverage.
As the autumn leaves change and the weather gets colder, we at CHIR are thankful for new health policy research. This November, Nia Gooding reviewed studies on policy interventions aimed at lowering health care costs, the impact of eliminating essential health benefits from private insurance plans, and tracking ACA marketplace premium costs for the coming year.
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.
