Many Americans are pinning their hopes on a vaccine to bring COVID-19 to heel. But, as George Washington University and CHIR experts outline in a new blog post for the Commonwealth Fund, our patchwork quilt system of public and private insurance will likely be insufficient to achieve the necessary population-wide immunity.
Several states ask for – and publicly post – health insurers’ proposed 2021 premium rates in May and June. These early rate filings can provide hints about how insurers are responding to market trends, policy changes, and emerging drivers of health care costs. CHIR’s Sabrina Corlette took a deep dive into insurers’ actuarial memos to find out how they’re thinking about COVID-19, repeal of the ACA’s individual mandate penalty, and more.
Many states acted to expand access to health care services as part of the fight against COVID-19, mandating that insurers cover and reduce consumers’ costs for COVID-19 and other health care services. Now that the public health emergency orders in many states are expiring, what, if any, of these insurance mandates should be retained? In their latest post for the Commonwealth Fund, CHIR’s Sabrina Corlette and Madeline O’Brien assess states’ options.
This May, we explored studies assessing COVID-19’s effect on community health centers, data on racial and ethnic disparities in COVID-19 mortality rates, and changes in health spending and utilization during the crisis.
The COVID-19 pandemic has introduced new challenges for Navigators. To learn more about their experience, and how they are helping consumers manage often unexpected transitions in coverage, CHIR’s Olivia Hoppe talked with six navigators across five states using the FFM to hear how they were faring.
As the coronavirus pandemic and economic shutdown continue, the Affordable Care Act’s health insurance marketplaces are an important tool in covering the uninsured. In a new post for the Commonwealth Fund’s To the Point blog, CHIR experts Rachel Schwab, Justin Giovannelli and Kevin Lucia explore how state-based marketplaces have worked to enroll the uninsured during the COVID-19 crisis by creating new opportunities to sign up for coverage and launching outreach campaigns.
As the nation combats the biggest threat to its public health and economy that any of us have seen in our lifetimes, the key to recovery will lie in widespread, universally accessible testing for COVID-19. In a recent blog post for Health Affairs, CHIR’s Sabrina Corlette argues that our traditional, insurance-based model of financing health care services won’t work if we want to use testing to help us get back to work, schools, and community life.
Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, states have taken charge of responding to the public health emergency. As a state that runs its own health insurance marketplace, Idaho has tools at its disposal to help consumers enroll in comprehensive coverage. But like the federal marketplace, Idaho decided not to wield all of them, leaving large marketplace enrollment barriers and instead promoting alternative and less comprehensive coverage.
The $175 billion Provider Relief Fund prohibits participating providers from balance billing COVID-19 patients, regardless of their source of coverage. While this could help many patients avoid surprise medical bills, there remain several questions about the scope of protection this will provide. In an update to his April 30, 2020 post, Georgetown expert Jack Hoadley takes a look at the fine print of the program as well as new guidance from HHS.
During February’s State of the Union address, President Trump touted his administration’s efforts to expand access to short-term health plans that do not comply with any of the ACA’s consumer protections. Short-term plans are often cheaper than ACA-compliant plans because they can deny coverage to people and exclude entire categories of services. In a recent post supported by The Commonwealth Fund, we reviewed 12 short-term plans to determine what coverage consumers would have if they needed treatment for COVID-19. We found that consumers in short-term plans are likely to have less financial protections than those enrolled in ACA plans.
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.
