Category: Exchanges

The Trump administration plans to shut down healthcare.gov, a website consumers use to sign up for the Affordable Care Act, for 12 hours on nearly every Sunday of the coming ACA enrollment season.

The outages, which the administration says are for maintenance, will occur from midnight through noon on every Sunday other than Dec. 10. This year’s enrollment season, which the administration has shortened to half the length of previous years, will run from Nov. 1 through Dec. 15 for states that use the federal marketplace.
. . .

Lower than expected enrollment, rising premiums, and declining issuer participation have led to an increased focus by state and federal policymakers on stabilizing the individual health insurance market. Legislative proposals aimed at addressing these concerns are currently being discussed. Assuming the package of proposals were approved by Congress and issuers were permitted and willing to refile rates for the 2018 plan year, a combination of these policies may lead to the reduction of individual market premiums—as compared to current law–by 13% to 17% for 2018, driven primarily by the reinsurance program as well as the continued Health Insurance Tax moratorium.

. . .

This brief describes alternative forms of subsidized reinsurance and the mechanisms by which they spread risk and reduce premiums. For a given amount of funding, a particular program’s efficacy will depend on how it affects insurers’ risk and the risk margins built into premiums, incentives for selecting or avoiding risks, incentives for coordinating and managing care, and the costs and complexity of administration. These effects warrant careful consideration by policymakers as they consider measures to achieve stability in the individual market in the long term.

. . .

Navigator groups that help educate and enroll consumers in the Affordable Care Act insurance exchanges are shutting down because the federal government isn’t paying them.

Several navigator organizations, including the University of South Florida, which received the country’s largest federal grant for navigation services in 2016, are suspending education and outreach activities ahead of the 2018 open enrollment period that is slated to begin Nov. 1.

. . .

Half of Virginia’s counties now are on track to have no health insurers offering Obamacare plans in 2018 after an insurer reversed a decision to sell individual health coverage in much of the state.

The pullback by Optima Health in Virginia ends a brief, two-week period in which every county in the United States was projected to have at least one Obamacare insurer next year.

. . .

Lawmakers and policy experts are honing in on a small handful of policies — mostly, different forms of federal funding and regulatory flexibility — as the Senate tries its hand at a bipartisan Affordable Care Act fix.

The first of several Senate HELP Committee hearings on the individual market included topics such as funding the cost-sharing subsidies, and expanding regulatory waivers for states. A handful of other policy ideas, including direct government payments to help offset the costs of expensive patients, were also discussed.

. . .

California and several other states will exempt themselves this year from a new Trump administration rule that cuts in half the amount of time consumers have to buy individual health insurance under the Affordable Care Act.

In California, lawmakers are contemplating legislation that would circumvent the rule in future years, too.

The Trump administration’s rule gives people shopping for 2018 coverage on the federal exchange 45 days to sign up, from Nov. 1 through Dec. 15.

. . .

Major healthcare insurer Anthem will only offer Obamacare exchange plans in roughly half of Kentucky’s 120 counties due to mounting policy uncertainty from Washington and a deteriorating market.

Anthem had earlier planned to offer individual market plans in every county in Kentucky. However, the insurer said that lingering problems with the market and massive federal uncertainty has forced its hand.

. . .

Virginia became the latest state at risk of having regions that will lack Affordable Care Act exchange plans next year, after a small insurer announced it will scale back the area where it expects to offer marketplace insurance.

The Virginia area that currently has no 2018 exchange insurer includes 48 counties and parts of six more, as well as 15 cities that are independent of counties, according to a Virginia state regulator. In total, the state has 95 counties and 38 independent cities.

. . .