Benefit plan design

Wayne Sakamoto of Naples, Fla. works hard to keep up with the ACA.

President Barack Obama pressed top U.S. insurers to help consumers cope with the rocky start of his health care law as the Republican-led House passed a bill that would let Americans keep their current policies through 2014.

The announcement that insurance carriers can offer one-year renewals for plans that were cancelled for not being compliant with the Affordable Care Act will have no effect on large employers, most of whom are currently in the middle of open enrollment. Small group plans, however, could be affected.

A broker and former Golden State-exchange staffer say that enrollment numbers do not reflect billing or payment.

A NAHU representative testified Thursday on Capitol Hill about the positives and negatives of self-funding before a committee interested in touting it to small business owners.

An agent explains the difficult steps that would need to be taken to renew canceled plans, while a health insurance trade group says the president’s announcement Thursday could “destabilize the market.”

America’s Health Insurance Plans issues a statement about President Obama's remarks today on the Affordable Care Act.

With the decision, state governors and insurance commissioners would have the authority to keep would-be canceled plans active until the end of 2014.

The decision, which helps live up to a promise Obama made when pushing for passage of health reform, is couched as an administrative fix that says following ACA will not require insurance companies to upgrade their plan for individuals who have been in these existing plans so far.

Brokers operating in the federally run exchange states remain frustrated with broker functions on the website, as the government announces lop-sided enrollment numbers for the state versus federal exchanges.

The lopsided enrollment between Medicaid, which is paid for with taxpayer money, and the private plans may boost criticism of the rising costs of the $1.4 trillion health law. High participation in the exchanges is critical to keeping the costs of medical coverage down.

As few as 20 or 30 enrollments per state per day are greeting the Obamacare marketplaces. With more congressional hearings on the rollout of the Affordable Care Act set to start tomorrow in the House, will lawmakers get some answers?

Walgreen Co. become the latest large employer to make significant changes to its employee health plan when it announced that it will move approximately 160,000 of its employees onto a private health insurance exchange, starting in 2014. The strategy is starting to look like a trend: Over the last several months, IBM, Time Warner, Sears Holdings and Darden Restaurants have all made similar announcements.

President Barack Obama said he’s sorry that thousands of Americans are losing their medical insurance as a result of his health care law, as his administration works to contain the political damage from the troubled roll-out of his signature domestic achievement.

The new rules, which come five years after the Mental Health Parity act was passed, mean insurers won’t be able to charge higher co-payments or deductibles for mental illness or limit the duration of care.

These two new reporting requirements are in addition to the current requirement to report the cost of coverage on Form W-2.

Congress has introduced bills to reverse an Obamacare change on how Flexible Savings Accounts can be spent. Meanwhile, will the new rollover change impact HSA account holders as well?

United Benefit Advisors is the latest group to launch private exchanges, though these are limited to brokers who are UBA members, there is one for small and one for large employers alike.

After Tuesday’s news that CMS wants to recruit more brokers to enroll consumers on Healthcare.gov, the group made the first public announcement Wednesday about a broker-focused website improvement.

Despite taking Healthcare.gov offline for hours a day to make technological fixes, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said Wednesday the site continued to experience multiple slowdowns and displayed error messages to numerous visitors throughout the day.