Affordable Care Act

This fact sheet provides an overview of the Healthy Indiana Plan, Indiana’s 1115 waiver demonstration project, and how it relates to the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion.

Si usted o alguien de su familia tiene una condición de salud preexistente – como una enfermedad cardíaca, asma o inclusive un embarazo – usted encontrará que es mucho más fácil obtener cobertura o cambiar de plan, comenzando en el 2014. Obamacare prohíbe a las aseguradoras negar cobertura a personas…

As enrollment statistics in the new health insurance marketplaces start to become available, there is a growing focus on whether the enrollment of so-called “young invincibles” will be sufficient to keep insurance markets stable. Enrollment of young adults is important, but not as important as conventional wisdom suggests since premiums…

This brief provides an overview of the many different paths to enrollment in Medicaid and CHIP, including paths created under the Affordable Care Act (ACA), and reviews the available national level data on enrollment through these avenues.

This issue brief dissects the issues raised by the legal challenges to the Affordable Care Act’s requirement that private insurance plans include contraception as part of their coverage of preventive services for women. Over 40 for-profit corporations and over 40 nonprofit corporations have filed lawsuits claiming that the requirement to provide their employees with contraceptives violates their religious rights. On November 26, 2013, the Supreme Court agreed to hear two cases filed by for-profit corporations, Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood Specialties, that claim that this requirement violates their religious rights. At the crux of these cases is a question that the Supreme Court has not previously addressed: Do for-profit corporations have religious protections under the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act and the First Amendment? The brief provides background on how the ACA’s contraceptive requirement works, summarizes some of the legal challenges brought by for-profit and non-profit organizations and discusses the implications of potential rulings by the Supreme Court.

This brief summarizes findings from 32 studies in 26 states analyzing the anticipated impact of the Affordable Care Act Medicaid expansion (and in some cases full ACA implementation) on state and local economies.

Amid heavy news coverage of problems with the Affordable Care Act’s rollout, the November Kaiser Health Tracking Poll finds a significant negative shift in the public’s views of the law, with roughly half now holding an unfavorable view and just a third holding a positive one.

After the October start of open enrollment, under the Affordable Care Act, many journalists, policymakers, and the public at large are eager for early data indicating how the law is working from the perspective of potential enrollees. In particular, given the problems with Healthcare.Gov and some of the state exchange websites, many people want quantitative data about people’s experiences attempting to purchase or enroll in some sort of health insurance coverage using these mechanisms.
This Data Note raises a note of caution about the possible pitfalls of using standard national public opinion polls to make judgments about Americans’ early experiences with health plan enrollment under the ACA.

On January 1, 2014, many key provisions of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) will start to go into effect, including the expansion of Medicaid to low-income adults and the launch of new Medicaid eligibility and enrollment processes, which are designed to move toward a coordinated enrollment system across health coverage programs, including Medicaid, CHIP, and the new Health Insurance Marketplaces. Over the past year, states have made steady and significant progress preparing for these changes, but readiness varies considerably as 2014 nears, and implementation work and ongoing process improvements will continue into the foreseeable future. To provide greater insight into the status of implementation, this report provides an overview of key state Medicaid eligibility and enrollment policies slated to go into effect based on data released by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).

To help states launch the Affordable Care Act (ACA) Medicaid expansion and efficiently enroll eligible individuals, CMS has offered states a series of facilitated enrollment options. These options include strategies, referred to as “fast track enrollment” in this issue brief, that allow states to enroll eligible individuals into coverage using data already available from their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance programs (SNAP) and/or their Medicaid or Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) programs for children. This issue brief provides an overview of the new “fast track” enrollment options, including how they have been implemented, their impacts, and key lessons learned. It is based on a series of interviews with state officials in Arkansas, Illinois, Oregon and West Virginia conducted by Manatt Health Solutions and the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured in October 2013.