Health insurers spent millions to defeat the ACA in 2010. Ten years later, major insurers are joining a growing coalition of supporters working to expand the law. CHIR expert Megan Houston considers why insurers are now embracing the ACA while Democrats now control Congress for the first time since the ACA was passed a decade ago.
President Biden has issued an Executive Order likely to expand the mandate for private insurers to cover, and waive cost-sharing, for COVID-19 testing. However, the Brookings Institution’s Loren Adler and Sabrina Corlette argue in a new blog post for Health Affairs that Congress will also need to act to ensure that the mandate doesn’t encourage price gouging by providers, and to fully eliminate cost barriers to universal testing.
We at CHIR are excited to ring in the New Year with new health insurance research! In December we reviewed studies on health care spending, marketplace subsidies for employer plans, public opinions on a COVID-19 vaccination, and the structure of health plan networks.
Open Enrollment has ended in most states, and many consumers have signed up for a health insurance plan offered on the marketplace. For those who haven’t, there may still be an opportunity to enroll in an ACA-compliant health insurance plan during a Special Enrollment Period (SEP), which are available in some states and to some consumers, depending on their eligibility. For more information, check out our state-by-state guide, which provides information on state specific policies toward health coverage.
We at Georgetown CHIR look back at this tumultuous, tragic, and eventful year and are thankful we have the opportunity to do the work we do. When the world went on lock down in early March, our team quickly pivoted to researching and writing about the government response to COVID-19 and its impact on health care coverage. We also wrote about surprise balance billing, junk insurance, and trends in provider-payer dynamics We share some of the highlights from our work here.
As the year comes to a close, CHIR’s Megan Houston reflects on the continued financial success of health insurance companies throughout the pandemic despite their repeated warnings of pent up demand.
Vaccinations against COVID-19 are on their way. For consumers in Affordable Care Act plans, immunization should have it fully covered by their insurance. In their latest post for the Commonwealth Fund’s To the Point blog, CHIR’s Sabrina Corlette and Madeline O’Brien review federal and state mandates to cover the COVID-19 vaccine, as well as potential gaps consumers could still fall into.
At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, many predicted that insurers would need to dramatically hike their premiums. As it turned out, the opposite occurred, with average rates declining for 2021. In an Expert Perspective post for the State Health & Value Strategies program, CHIR’s Sabrina Corlette and Manatt Health’s Joel Ario examine the factors that led to a stable year for ACA insurance rates.
The Supreme Court has required the federal government to reimburse health insurers for an estimated $12.3 billion in unpaid risk corridor funds and the Trump administration recently published guidance to insurers that affects the amount to be returned to policyholders. In an Expert Perspective for the State Health & Value Strategies program, Sabrina Corlette and Jason Levitis consider the effects of this guidance and state options for redirecting insurers’ extra cash to benefit policyholders and the public.
States and the federal government are preparing for the approval of a COVID-19 vaccine. But just as important as distributing and administering the vaccine is figuring out how to pay for it. In her latest “expert perspective” for the State Health & Value Strategies program, Sabrina Corlette discusses recent federal efforts to ensure that private health plans cover the full costs of a COVID-19 vaccine, as well as options for states to close potential gaps in coverage.
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.
