And Other New Resources on the NDNRC
Now that we are over four months into the open enrollment period, some questions have arisen about what can and should be done for individuals who wish to change policies when they’ve already enrolled. Of interest on this issue is a blog post from the Georgetown University Center on Health Insurance Reforms addressing the rules on changing health insurance policies after enrollment. Additionally, CMS recently conducted a training for navigators and assisters on updates to healthcare.gov related to making changes in a policy to which an individual is already enrolled – that slide presentation should be released in the near future and will be posted on our Resources page when it becomes available.
CMS has also released some other resources of note. The first is on Medicare & the Health Insurance Marketplace while the second is an Informational Bulletin on the Implementation of Hospital Presumptive Eligibility.
In addition to these resources, over the last two weeks we have posted several new resources which you should know about. The first is also our first Fact Sheet which addresses understanding a health plans summary of benefits and coverage. In addition, the National Health Council has added more to their Putting Patients First website, including a cost calculator to assist in determining out-of-pocket costs. Also, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation recently launched a Health Tax Credit Tool which helps consumers determine if they are eligible for the Premium Tax Credit.
We posted three presentations from the National Institute for Health Care Management (NIHCM) which addressed Medicaid expansion. The presentations dealt with experiences with early expansion, alternatives to expansion and the cost of not expanding. Along these lines we also posted a presentation from the National Academy for State Health Policy (NASHP) which highlighted three different state approaches to Medicaid expansion. These three states are Arizona, Arkansas and New York. Speaking of state resources,we now have state specific resources for 26 different states and these can be found on those state pages. The 26 states are: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Connecticut, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Washington and Wisconsin