HIX 2.0: New Alternatives for State Participation in Health Insurance Exchanges

HIX 2.0: New Alternatives for State Participation in Health Insurance Exchanges

A successful exchange model provides a simple and intuitive front-end shopping experience for eligible consumers, a support module to promote broker and navigator usage, and a robust back-end system to integrate with issuers, state and federal agency systems. States must examine the following four important criteria: • Implementation cost. • Solution flexibility and interoperability. • Speed to...

Plan Participation in Health Insurance Exchanges: Implications for Competition and Choice

Encouraging value-based insurance designs in state health insurance exchanges.

OBJECTIVES One of the main goals of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) is to control the costs of US healthcare. Channeling patients toward more effective services is one of many approaches being used to control costs while improving health outcomes. This paper reviews value-based insurance design (VBID) concepts and discusses options for states to encourage these designs in the new health insurance...

The Experiences of State-Run Insurance Marketplaces That Use HealthCare.gov.

States have flexibility in implementing the Affordable Care Act's health insurance marketplaces and may choose to become more (or less) involved in marketplace operations over time. Interest in new implementation approaches has increased as states seek to ensure the long-term financial stability of their exchanges and exercise local control over marketplace oversight. This brief explores the ex...

Employer Subsidies for Health Insurance Premiums: Massachusetts’ Unique Experiment

Efforts to enroll low-income workers in premium assistance programs are constrained by the health insurance offer rates of the firms who employ them. One solution is to target premium subsidies to small firms as well as to their low-income workers, and Massachusetts is the sole state to have tried this. Firms participating in the state’s Insurance Partnership were more likely to be self-employe...