In its release of wonk beach reading late last month, the 539-page  HHS Notice of Benefit and Payment Parameters for 2017 and the 87-page 2017 Letter to Issuers in the Federally-facilitated Marketplace, the federal government displayed its latest efforts to apply science to the issue of network adequacy.  Beginning in 2018, for policies sold on healthcare.gov, the federal government will rate and display plans as “Basic,” “Standard” or “Broad.”

This network rating will be in addition to the federal government’s current efforts to ensure that networks established by an insurer are not so sparse as to be useless to the consumer. It does not appear as if states running their own exchanges will be required to do more than assess insurer networks for adequacy; state websites will not have to grade the quality of insurer networks for policies sold on their exchanges.