OPEN ENROLLMENT SET TO BEGIN
Open Enrollment starts next week and if you’re looking for a promotional brochure to use for people with disabilities, then check out the handout entitled “Time to Check Your Health Insurance.” This brochure was prepared by the Consortium for Citizens with Disabilities and highlights the issues consumers need to think about during the next three months and the critical dates throughout open enrollment. The brochure can be downloaded here and is also available on the Materials page of the website here.
The NDNRC also wants to make sure you have all the resources you need to be able to assist individuals with disabilities as they consider their options on the ACA marketplace. We have a Disability Guide which is meant to strengthen disability literacy, help you identify and provide appropriate accommodations and assist you in correctly identifying issues that are central to healthcare insurance for people with disabilities. The disability guide is available on our website and for PDF download here.
The NDNRC also has 17 topical fact sheets and 9 population specific fact sheets. The topical fact sheets address issues such as rehabilitation and habilitation benefits, prescription medication benefits, mental health and substance abuse parity and the process for Medicaid eligibility. The population specific fact sheets cover a wide variety of disabilities such as autism, intellectual disabilities, mental illness and veterans. All of the NDNRC fact sheets are available here.
All these resources are highlighted in our latest blog post entitled “Disability Resources for OE4” here.
In preparation for the upcoming open enrollment, the Kaiser Family Foundation hosted a web briefing this week entitled “Key Issues Ahead of the Affordable Care Act’s Fourth Open Enrollment Period.” The briefing has been archived on Kaiser’s website and can be viewed here. Kaiser also just released an issue brief which addresses some of the concerns going into OE4 such as premium increases and insurer participation. That issue brief is available here.
As OE4 approaches, did you know that you can begin to review plans online? “Window shopping” is now available on healthcare.gov for states in the federally facilitated marketplaces. To begin to look at plans, click here.
If you missed it earlier this week, the NDNRC presented on a webinar for the National Association of Community Health Centers (NACHC) that focused on hard to reach populations. The slides for the NDNRC portion of the webinar are available now on the “Webinars/Presentations” page of our website. The full presentation will be available through NACHC within the next two weeks.
Last week we highlighted the outreach campaign initiated by CMS this year for OE4. (To read more about the campaign, check out our news item by clicking here.) If you want to learn more about this campaign, there are two new blog posts you can read which go into detail about CMS’s plans, one from the Georgetown Center on Health Insurance Reforms can be found here and another blog post from Health Affairs can be found here.
A recent blog post by Community Catalyst looks at some of the recent research on the phenomenon known as churning. Churning is the result of individuals’ eligibility status changing between marketplace coverage and Medicaid. Check out our news item for a link to the blog post and for other resources that address churning. The news item is available here.
Are you looking for local partners to help with outreach to the disability community? The NDNRC has Community Outreach Collaboratives (COCs) for Open Enrollment Year 4 (OE4). The COCs increase collaborations in the community, dissemination and outreach efforts and enrollment of people with disabilities in the ACA marketplace. To find a COC, click here.
To access the archives for our weekly updates click here.
