Six states and the District of Columbia. will use their own money in 2015 to sustain the federal Medicaid pay raise to primary care doctors. The pay raise stems from a provision of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) that expands Medicaid fees for primary care to the same amount paid under Medicare. The states are Maryland, Colorado, New Mexico, Iowa, Alabama, and Mississippi. Interestingly, Mississippi and Alabama did not participate in the Medicaid expansion under the ACA.
About 10.3 million Americans have gained insurance coverage since the full implementation of Obamacare last year, according to an analysis published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine. The study, done by Harvard researchers and published by the NEJM, was based on Gallup polling and data from the Department of Health and Human Services. It also estimated that the uninsured rate declined by 5.2 percentage points in the second quarter of 2014, or from 21 percent in September 2013 to 16.3 percent in April 2014. In particular, it found jumps in the insurance rates for Hispanics, blacks and young adults.
New enrollments in Obamacare's Medicaid expansion and other healthcare programs for the poor have reached 6.7 million people since the launch of President Barack Obama's healthcare reforms last year, the administration said on Friday. CMS says about 26.4 million children were enrolled in CHIP or Medicaid overall, and 56 percent of all enrollees in the programs are children.
According to three new studies, the health law has in its first year reduced the number of uninsured adults by between 8 million and 11 million, and the majority of enrollees report satisfaction with their plans. The numbers don’t all match, and health care experts say they’re not precise enough to give more than a general idea of the trend. However, millions of people who didn’t have health insurance before the Affordable Care Act have gained it since last fall.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) released its Medicaid Enrollment Report for April, 2014. As of the end of April, 6 million more individuals were enrolled in Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) as compared to the period before the initial open enrollment under the Affordable Care Act started in October, 2013. That includes 1.1 million additional people enrolled in April as compared to March in the 48 states that reported data for both April and March.
In its latest April 2014 report on the Affordable Care Act (ACA), the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) announced that it is no longer possible to project the overall fiscal impact of the health care law.
Monteith Illingworth and Chris Abbate both have small public relations firms in Manhattan. Both offer their employees health coverage through Oxford Health, a division of insurance giant United Healthcare. Both faced double-digit premium hikes last year. And both considered hitting the eject button to buy coverage from the New York State of Health, the new insurance marketplace set up under the Affordable Care Act.
If you offer it, will they come? Insurers and some U.S. senators have proposed offering cheaper, skimpier "copper" plans on the health insurance marketplaces to encourage uninsured stragglers to buy. But consumer advocates and some policy experts say that focusing on reducing costs on the front end exposes consumers to unacceptably high out-of-pocket costs if they get sick. The trade-off, they say, may not be worth it.
The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has issued final regulations on the small business health care tax credit under Health Care Reform, which include information on the requirement to purchase health insurance coverage through the Small Business Health Options Program (SHOP) Marketplace.
Nearly six in 10 Americans who bought insurance for this year through the health law’s online marketplaces were previously uninsured—most for at least two years, according to a new survey that looks at the experiences of those most affected by the law.
