Administration Looks At Ways To Ensure Health Care Continuity
Meanwhile, tens of thousands are unable to appeal enrollment errors and a little-known provision of the law extends coverage to former foster kids until they turn 26.
The Wall Street Journal: Administration Weighs Extending A Change To Health Law
The Obama administration said Friday that it is considering ways to extend into 2015 efforts to prevent consumers whose health coverage changes from suddenly losing access to particular doctors. President Barack Obama was told by a Kentucky woman in a Google Hangout on Friday afternoon that she was worried her 10-year-old son would not be able to continue to see his specialist ... Mr. Obama replied: "If you have a particular specialist and you haven’t found that specialist in the network of the exchange that’s offered in Kentucky, then we are looking at rules to make sure that somebody who’s actively being treated, for example, can remain with their specialist for the duration of their treatment" (Radnofsky, Favole and Corbett Dooren, 1/31).
The Washington Post: Healthcare.gov Can't Handle Appeals Of Enrollment Errors
Tens of thousands of people who discovered that HealthCare.gov made mistakes as they were signing up for a health plan are confronting a new roadblock: The government cannot yet fix the errors. Roughly 22,000 Americans have filed appeals with the government to try to get mistakes corrected, according to internal government data obtained by The Washington Post. They contend that the computer system for the new federal online marketplace charged them too much for health insurance, steered them into the wrong insurance program or denied them coverage entirely (Goldstein, 2/2).
Kaiser Health News: When Your Parent Is the State, It's Tough For Young Adults To Stay Insured
A little-known provision of federal health law now extends Medicaid coverage to former foster youths until they turn 26, regardless of where they live or how much they earn. The only requirements: They must have been in foster care when they turned 18 and have previously received Medicaid, the state-run insurance plan for the poor known as Medi-Cal in California (Gorman, 2/3).
Kaiser Health News Video: Former Foster Youth Stay Insured Until 26 (de Marco, 1/3)
The Washington Post: Court To Review Religious Law Once Hailed By Democrats But Now Used To Battle Obamacare
A law championed by Senate Democrats (including one named Joe Biden) to undermine a Supreme Court ruling written by Justice Antonin Scalia has become the latest obstacle to the Affordable Care Act. Who says Washington’s not bipartisan? Of course, no one knew back in 1993 that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) would one day be invoked by business owners who say their religious beliefs forbid offering employees health insurance plans that cover some types of contraceptives (Barnes, 2/2).
The Washington Post’s The Fact Checker: The Most Popular Fact Checks Of January (It’s Still Almost All About Obamacare)
Fact checks about the Affordable Care Act continue to dominate our monthly roundup of the most widely read fact checks. In fact, the only non-Obamacare fact check to make it in our top five list (on the Keystone XL pipeline) just narrowly beat out yet another health-care fact check. In compiling this list, we focused on full fact checks of specific claims. ... 2. The GOP claim that more Americans have lost insurance than gained it under Obamacare ... 3: Ignore claims that 3.9 million people signed up for Medicaid because of Obamacare (Kessler, 2/3).
