PPACA law drives access
Under pressure from the Obama administration, insurers say they will not deny health coverage for sick children pending new regulations, and would follow the intent of the law, not the exact language of it.
A SCUFFLE LAST MONTH foreshadowed a hint of the challenges to come. The industry questioned whether plans would cover children with pre-existing medical problems right away, or delay doing so until next September, which the law, as written, seems to permit.
Under pressure from the Obama administration, insurers said they would not deny health insurance for sick children pending new regulations and would follow the intent of the law, not the exact language of it.
Insurers also moved quickly to confirm that they would provide dependent coverage for children up to age 26 in individual and group policies and would begin revising plans to reduce lifetime and annual limits on coverage and halt policy rescissions.
According to the Commonwealth Fund, 89% of leaders in healthcare and health policy believe the new law will successfully expand access to affordable health insurance. Additionally, 90% of the 1,300 opinion leaders surveyed believe new insurance market rules are important or very important priorities.
-Jill Wechsler and Julie Miller
In this episode of the "Meet the Board" podcast series, Briana Contreras, Managed Healthcare Executive editor, speaks with Ateev Mehrotra, a member of the MHE editorial advisory board and a professor of healthcare policy and medicine at Harvard Medical School. Mehtrotra is also a hospitalist at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. In the discussion, Contreras gets to know Mehrotra more on a personal level and picks his brain on some of his research interests including telehealth, alternative payment models and price transparency.
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