{"id":5552,"date":"2020-05-13T13:18:37","date_gmt":"2020-05-13T17:18:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chirblog.org\/?p=5552"},"modified":"2020-05-19T16:55:39","modified_gmt":"2020-05-19T20:55:39","slug":"age-covid-19-short-term-plans-fall-short-consumers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chirblog.org\/age-covid-19-short-term-plans-fall-short-consumers\/","title":{"rendered":"In the Age of COVID-19, Short-Term Plans Fall Short for Consumers"},"content":{"rendered":"

During February\u2019s State of the Union address, President\u00a0Trump touted<\/a>\u00a0his administration\u2019s efforts to expand access to short-term health plans that do not comply with any of the Affordable Care Act\u2019s (ACA) consumer protections. Short-term plans are\u00a0often cheaper<\/a>\u00a0than ACA-compliant plans because they can deny coverage to people with preexisting health conditions, impose higher cost-sharing, and exclude entire categories of services. Still, advocates of short-term plans\u00a0argue that<\/a>\u00a0they provide sufficient coverage for catastrophic medical situations, such as COVID-19. But while recent federal\u00a0guidance requires<\/a>\u00a0private health insurers to cover COVID-19 testing and cost-sharing for related services, this requirement does not extend to short-term plans, which\u00a0claim to be covering<\/a>\u00a0some costs but not all.<\/p>\n

In a recent post<\/a> support by The Commonwealth Fund, we reviewed plan brochures for 12 short-term plans currently being sold in Georgia, Louisiana, and Ohio and found that people enrolled in them have less financial protection if they need treatment for COVID-19 than people enrolled in ACA plans.<\/p>\n

As consumers seek health coverage during the coronavirus pandemic, policymakers should consider whether short-term plans will meet their needs. Our review of current short-term plans shows that their limitations could be especially problematic for people who become ill and need care for COVID-19.<\/p>\n

To learn more about the limitations of short-term plans during this pandemic, you can access the full blog post here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

During February\u2019s State of the Union address, President\u00a0Trump touted\u00a0his administration\u2019s 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\u00a0often cheaper\u00a0than ACA-compliant plans because they can deny coverage to people and exclude entire categories of services.\u00a0In 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":313,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[702,447,726,104,431,281],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chirblog.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5552"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chirblog.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chirblog.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chirblog.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chirblog.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5552"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/chirblog.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5552\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5554,"href":"https:\/\/chirblog.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5552\/revisions\/5554"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chirblog.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/313"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chirblog.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5552"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chirblog.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5552"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chirblog.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5552"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}