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McAuliffe Wants Authority To Expand Medicaid

Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffe proposed Monday that lawmakers give him the ability to expand Medicaid eligibility on his own if a state commission doesn’t act by the end of the 2014 legislative session.

McAuliffe said the state can’t afford to wait much longer for the Medicaid Innovation and Reform Commission to decide whether the state should expand the publicly funded health insurance program for the poor and disabled to an additional 400,000 Virginians.

Read the full report here.

Contact Steven Cosby with questions or to request more information and to schedule a healthcare plan evaluation, savings analysis or group plan solution for your company.

Rules for Equal Coverage by Employers Remain Elusive Under Health Law

The Obama administration is delaying enforcement of another provision of the new health care law, one that prohibits employers from providing better health benefits to top executives than to other employees.

Tax officials said they would not enforce the provision this year because they had yet to issue regulations for employers to follow.

The Affordable Care Act, adopted nearly four years ago, says employer-sponsored health plans must not discriminate “in favor of highly compensated individuals” with respect to either eligibility or benefits. The government provides a substantial tax break for employer-sponsored insurance, and, as a matter of equity and fairness, lawmakers said employers should not provide more generous coverage to a select group of high-paid employees.

But translating that goal into reality has proved difficult.

Read the full report here.

Doug Holtz-Eakin Is Starting A New Health-care Think Tank

The politics of health care may, for the moment, be mired in gridlock. But Republican policy analyst Douglas Holtz-Eakin thinks the time will come when his party will stop trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act and Democrats will start trying to fix it.

When that day arrives, both sides will need help charting a path through the health policy wilderness. So Holtz-Eakin, a former director of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office opened the virtual doors of a new think tank known as the Center for Health and Economy.

Read the full report here.

House Passes Bill Requiring Detailed, Weekly Obamacare Reports

The House passed a bill last Thursday that requires the federal government to deliver weekly reports on Obamacare enrollment and a range of other activities on the health care law’s main website.

Republican leaders shepherded the “Exchange Information Disclosure Act” to passage, 259 to 154, with the help of more than 30 Democrats. “This bill is fundamentally about transparency,” Rep. Joe Pitts, Pennsylvania Republican, said during debate.

The legislation garnered about half the Democratic support of an Obamacare bill that past the chamber last week and requires the government to notify users within two days of any security breaches on websites tied to the Affordable Care Act.

Read the full report here.

Contact Steven Cosby with questions or to request more information and to schedule a healthcare plan evaluation, savings analysis or group plan solution for your company.

O-Care Official: Back-end Still Not Finished

An official involved in ObamaCare’s rollout told lawmakers Thursday that the payment system at HealthCare.gov remains incomplete, even as users are reporting better experiences on the site.

Gary Cohen, the director of Medicare’s Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight, revealed that a system to directly transfer federal subsidies to insurance companies is still being built.

The remarks came more than three months after the launch of HealthCare.gov, which had enrolled more than one million people in private plans as of Dec. 31.

Cohen testified before the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on Oversight, where members pressed him to estimate when the back-end payment system would be finished.

While Cohen did not give a timetable for the project, he said that a stopgap system would pay insurers next week based on calculations of what they are owed.

The back-office functions of HealthCare.gov remain a thorn in the side of federal health officials as they seek to boost enrollment before the period ends March 31.

Read the full report here.

Contact Steven Cosby with questions or to request more information and to schedule a healthcare plan evaluation, savings analysis or group plan solution for your company.