State insurance regulators face the challenge of sustaining staffing levels achieved thanks to Affordable Care Act rate review grants. As these grant programs wind down, state officials get some helpful advice in Sally McCarty’s account of how she dealt with a similar challenge when she was Indiana’s insurance commissioner.
In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision in King v. Burwell, our colleague at Georgetown University Law Center’s O’Neill Institute, Tim Westmoreland, considers the case. He finds that, for all the accompanying politics and drama, it never passed the laugh test.
The Affordable Care Act’s Summary of Benefits and Coverage – standardized, easy-to-use summaries of health plan benefits got an update last week with new regulations out from the Obama Administration. CHIR’s JoAnn Volk provides an overview – as well as a preview of some likely additional upgrades.
There’s been some renewed attention to the status and future of the small business health insurance market, particularly as an Affordable Care Act reform scheduled to go into effect in 2016 could cause some disruption. Last week CHIR researchers contributed to three great new resources to help policymakers and others understand changes in the market and some of the challenges ahead.
Health care policy debates can often be confusing but the rapidly shifting positions in the latest tempest on Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act are harder to follow than a ping-pong ball. Our colleague at Georgetown’s Center for Children and Families, Adam Searing, attempts to make sense of all the contradictions.
May 15th marks the official start of rate review season for health insurers’ proposed 2016 premium rates. Sabrina Corlette has this preview.
Discussion of new “superwaiver” authority is a hot topic among many state and health policy circles. The Affordable Care Act allows states to modify key reforms beginning in 2017 through a so-called 1332 waiver application. States could also choose to coordinate this waiver with Medicaid and/or CHIP reforms through a 1115 waiver. CHIR’s Sabrina Corlette and Joan Alker of the Center for Children and Families assess the waiver process outlined to date and the need for transparency and stakeholder input on the critical policy decisions that will be required.
Beginning this week, a new version of the change in income special enrollment period will take effect, providing a pathway to premium tax credits for some caught in the Medicaid coverage gap. JoAnn Volk provides an update on this “new and improved” SEP.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) recently announced that they had fixed a technical glitch in healthcare.gov that may have cost people thousands of dollars in subsidies. Our colleague at Georgetown’s Center for Children and Families, Tricia Brooks, helped to identify the problem early on and offers this take on what CMS can do to help the people affected by the error.
In their latest web video, CHIR researchers JoAnn Volk and Sabrina Corlette discuss the findings from their most recent research report, in which they analyzed consumer experiences with health insurance through the eyes of state consumer assistance programs.
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.
