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Insurance columnist explains that the essential health benefits that all new individual and small-group health plans must offer reflect a core package that experts thought everyone should have access to.
For more than four hours in a Capitol Hill hearing Thursday, House Energy and Commerce Committee members grilled contractors who helped build the health law’s problem-plagued online insurance marketplace. KHN’s Mary Agnes Carey and Politico Pro’s Jennifer Haberkorn discuss the next steps.
Mom-and-Pop shops give way to large group practices that often accept discounted rates from insurers.
Despite the president’s urging that frustrated consumers use call centers, advocates say they’re not “a realistic alternative” for comparing and selecting coverage.
The health law gives consumers until March 31 to sign up for health insurance, but it may be weeks before coverage begins. So the administration says it will not penalize anyone who signs up by that date.
Websites like eHealthInsurance.com that were planning to start selling new, subsidized Obamacare policies on Oct. 1 still can’t offer them to customers.
Medicaid patients can see different kinds of doctors in one visit, and the hope is it will provide better patient care, eventually at less cost to the state.
Using health law subsidies, many will be able to afford health coverage for the first time. But the insurance they’ll be buying comes with caveats.
Consumer columnist Michelle Andrews answers questions about the insurance landscape under the new health law.
If the bugs are not repaired by mid-November, fewer young and healthy people may enroll in new plans, spurring future price hikes and other problems, say experts.
“Nobody is madder than me” about the problems consumers have had with the federal insurance marketplace, Obama said in a Rose Garden speech, “which means it’s going to get fixed.”
Many physicians and hospitals have been unable to determine which health plans offered in the health law’s insurance marketplace include them in their provider networks.
