Health Affairs

The Affordable Care Act’s state health insurance exchanges for small businesses present a host of opportunities for states now creating them, but they also present design and regulatory challenges that could make or break the success of the program, according to a cluster of articles in the February issue of Health Affairs, released yesterday. The [...]

Briefs continue to be filed at a furious pace in the Affordable Care Act Supreme Court litigation.  On January 6, the federal government led off with its brief challenging the decision of the Eleventh Circuit federal court of appeals that the ACA’s minimum coverage requirement (individual mandate) is unconstitutional.  The states and the National Federation [...]

At the Colorado Health Care Insider, Louise Norris hosts the latest edition of the Health Wonk Review. Louise includes Sharon Long’s Health Affairs Blog post clarifying the facts about health reform in Massachusetts. Check out Sharon’s post and all the great posts in Louise’s Wonk Review.

Last Thursday’s Republican Presidential Debate in Florida included a lively, but not always accurate, exchange on health reform in Massachusetts.  In particular, Senator Santorum reported that one in four Massachusetts residents were going without needed care because of high costs; he also implied that the share of residents choosing to pay the fine for failing [...]

Medicaid, the nation’s largest public health insurance program, provides health coverage for low-income people, or about one in five Americans. The program will also play a central role in expanding insurance coverage under the Affordable Care Act. However, recent concerns about federal budget deficits and the fiscal pressures on states have generated new proposals to [...]

Massachusetts’s health reform bill, which provided the template for the federal Affordable Care Act, went into effect in 2006. In a statewide survey taken in 2010, 94.2 percent of the state’s nonelderly (19–64) residents reported being covered, a significant increase over the 86.6 percent estimate of 2006. The survey is reported in a Health Affairs [...]

On January 10th, the states filed their latest arguments in their bid to have the ACA’s Medicaid expansion declared an unconstitutional coercion.  Following an effort to piece together a coercion doctrine from dicta found in a handful of Supreme Court cases, the states assert that the “[t]he ACA is Premised on the Understanding that It [...]

One of the priorities established in the Affordable Care Act is providing better, more efficient care to the “dual eligibles,” low-income seniors enrolled in both Medicare and Medicaid. AcademyHealth’s 2012 National Health Policy Conference (NHPC) will feature a panel on this topic, which is crucial to the nation’s goal of restraining health care cost growth [...]

As every reader knows, the Supreme Court has agreed to consider challenges that have been brought to the constitutionality of two provisions of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) by twenty-six states, the National Federation of Independent Businesses, and individual plaintiffs.  The Court has scheduled the case for five and a half hours of oral arguments [...]

What will the Obama Administration’s health policy priorities be in 2012? What ideas will be highest on the agendas of the two parties in Congress? You can hear the answers to these questions February 13-14 in Washington D.C. at the 2012 National Health Policy Conference. The NHPC will include presentations from Health and Human Services [...]

Editor’s note: See additional posts discussing Pioneer accountable care organizations by Debra Ness and William Kramer and Douglas Hastings. The December 19 announcement by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) of 32 Medicare Pioneer ACOs underscores the transition of “shared savings” and “accountable care” from policy concepts to implementation. Perhaps more than any [...]

The recent CMS bulletin on the essential benefits package (EBP) required for certain types of coverage under the Affordable Care Act has been described in greater detail in earlier Health Affairs Blog posts by Tim Jost and Kavita Patel.  The bulletin is a pragmatic document, seemingly driven by the overall exigency of implementing the ACA [...]

In the recently released bulletin from HHS on the essential health benefits (EHB), the administration answered a major question on the minds of many critical healthcare stakeholders: Will the administration be specific in their guidance and create a definition of what constitutes “essential?”  The answer, is no, they will leave the bulk of the decision-making [...]

On December 16, 2011, HHS released a “bulletin” describing the approach that it intends to take to establishing the “essential health benefits” under the Affordable Care Act.  A bulletin is a form of guidance that lacks the legal stature of a rule.  HHS believed, however, that the states, insurers, consumer advocates, and the public needed [...]

Among the issues on which the United States Supreme Court has agreed to hear oral arguments in the Affordable Care Act cases is the question of whether its minimum Medicaid coverage requirements are constitutional. The states have based their appeal on a legal theory known as the “coercion doctrine.”  Citing a long history of precedents, [...]

The week of December 5 was a particularly busy week in health care reform implementation.  After a lull over the Thanksgiving holiday, new regulations, proposed regulations, guidance, and grant announcements have poured out of the agencies.  This post will briefly summarize three of these issuances: the final rule on the Establishment of Consumer Operated and [...]

As 2011 comes to a close, we draw ever closer to January 1, 2014, the day when the most significant changes wrought by the Affordable Care Act will come into effect.  Indeed, we are only weeks away from the halfway point between March, 2010, when the ACA was signed into law and October, 2013, the [...]

Attend AcademyHealth’s National Health Policy Conference (NHPC) to hear directly from state policymakers, analysts, and practitioners about how they are facing those challenges and seizing new opportunities in a post-ACA environment. The 2012 meeting agenda features a special focus on states: Challenges of ACA Implementation at the State Level Representatives from some of the agencies [...]

Today, November 14, 2011, the Supreme Court decided to review a decision of the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals striking down the minimum coverage requirement of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) as unconstitutional.  The case will probably be argued before the Court in March and decided in the early summer. Procedurally, the Court “granted certiorari.”  [...]

When the Lewin Group speaks, people listen.  In 2009 Lewin projected that a public plan option could reduce private insurance coverage by two-thirds, a finding that was used to strip the public option from the reform law.  Knowing this impact, it sent shivers down my spine when, on Halloween, I read their latest study, published [...]