Health Plan Weekly

Trade groups representing health insurers and insurance agents are giving mixed reviews to a recently finalized rule that reinstated strict limits on short-term, limited duration insurance (STLDI) plans. 

The rule, first proposed in July 2023, sought to revive Obama administration-era standards regarding STLDI plans — which are exempt from Affordable Care Act consumer protections such as barring insurers from denying coverage to people with preexisting conditions. Both the Obama and Biden administrations were concerned that consumers often mistake such plans for comprehensive coverage, potentially leaving them with nasty surprises when they need care. 

Data sharing and staff contacts are the keys to improving collaboration between Medicaid managed care organizations and public health departments, according to California officials and plan staffers. Leaders from managed care plans say that close collaboration improves outcomes for high-needs populations who struggle with one or more social barriers to health. 

“When you're looking at claims data, we're obviously not going to see a claim for homelessness. We’re not going to be able to capture that. But when we take our data and bump it against data that's available to some of the public health jurisdictions, and we find out that some of our members are facing housing instability, then that also gives us the ability to understand that maybe their health outcomes are directly being affected by these social determinants of health,” said Nishtha Patel, manager of care transformation at Inland Empire Health Plan (IEHP), during a March 21 Manatt LLP webinar. “No matter what we do intervention-wise, if we're not addressing those, their health outcomes are not ever going to improve.”  

Over the first 10 years of the Affordable Care Act marketplaces, enrollment nationwide has almost tripled, from 8 million individuals in 2014 to 21.4 million in 2024, according to an HHS report.

While the ACA initially envisioned the marketplaces to be developed by states, it also provided states with the option to participate in the federally facilitated marketplace, HealthCare.gov. In 2014, 14 states and the District of Columbia chose to operate their own state-based marketplaces (SBMs). In 2024, there are 19 SBMs.

A new report by Brookings Institution researchers concludes that the No Surprises Act, the 2020 law that banned surprise medical billing, may cause prices — and consequently premiums — to increase, even though policymakers hoped the law would slow or reverse price growth. The report also concludes that a small group of providers, particularly physician staffing groups owned by private equity entities, are responsible for most of the price increases. 

This unintended consequence raises the stakes of ongoing litigation between the Texas Medical Association (TMA) and the Biden administration. Those lawsuits challenge regulations governing the NSA-created, HHS-backed arbitration process, called Independent Dispute Resolution (IDR), which resolves balance billing disputes between payers and providers when patients unintentionally receive out-of-network care. The TMA and other provider groups have successfully sued multiple times to block IDR rulemaking that many experts believe would have kept price growth in check.