Consumers shopping for health insurance on healthcare.gov will see premiums increase by an average of 7.5 percent, according to data released by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services on Monday. Open enrollment begins on Sunday, Nov. 1.
Many health plans sold through the Affordable Care Act in 2015 are so limited they don’t offer patients access to some medical specialists such as endocrinologists, rheumatologists and psychiatrists, a new study suggests. That may be forcing some patients to pay thousands of dollars out of their own pockets for any care provided by these specialists.
Some health insurance plans sold on the Affordable Care Act’s federal marketplace may not provide reasonable access to medical specialists, new research suggests. Under the act, also known as Obamacare, the federal marketplace offers subsidized private health insurance to consumers in states that didn’t establish their own health insurance exchanges.
Monday night’s spending agreement between the White House and Congress would repeal part of the Affordable Care Act. But the provision is a narrow one that few people knew existed and even fewer supported enthusiastically. The Obama administration had stalled writing the rules that would have put it into effect and, with no signs of imminent action, most Washington insiders figured it was only a matter of time before Congress took it off the books anyway. For better or worse, or maybe a bit of both, the provision was the regulatory equivalent of a dead man walking.
Proponents of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) have frequently pointed to official cost estimates projecting that the law will reduce federal budget deficits. Much less attention has been paid to the primary reason for this favorable outlook: the law’s heavy reliance on indexing important provisions to restrain spending and increase revenue. These components of the ACA will automatically impose perpetual, across-the-board cuts on payments to certain institutional medical providers; increase premiums for lower-income households; and raise taxes on an ever-expanding segment of taxpayers.
Arches Health Plan, a membership cooperative that was born out of the Affordable Care Act and insures 66,000 Utahns, has been ordered out of the insurance market for 2016. Arches insures more low-income Utahns on the federal exchange, healthcare.gov, than any other company besides Select Health. But it also has customers who get their insurance on their jobs and individuals who buy plans through insurance agents or brokers.