It’s now been a full year since the individual mandate penalty was reduced to zero, so we wanted to take a quick look at the impact this change could have on the future of the Affordable Care Act.
On December 18, 2019, a federal appeals court in New Orleans ruled that the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate is unconstitutional, calling into question the future of the entire law.
As AHCP first reported nearly two years ago, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has been working to replace everyone’s Medicare card and assign them a new Medicare number, known as a Medicare Beneficiary Identifier (MBI). As of January 1, 2020, that process is complete and CMS will no longer process claims that are submitted with the old number.
As a reminder, Medicare supplement plan F is no longer an option for new Medicare enrollees. Anyone aging into or signing up for Medicare on or after January 1, 2020, will not be able to purchase a Plan F Medigap plan. Plan C is also being eliminated as an option for new enrollees.
A recent Boston Herald article describes the trouble that some seniors have paying for prescriptions in the Medicare coverage gap, commonly referred to as the “donut hole.” The article tells the story of Judith Pais, who ran out of her medication in November and had to wait until the new year to purchase her prescriptions because the cost of her medications had “skyrocketed” from $120 per month to more than $500 after she entered her Part D plan’s coverage gap.
The fourth quarter is a stressful time. Not only do brokers have to deal with the same year-end stuff as everyone else, like getting ready for the holidays, it’s also the busy time of the year in the insurance industry. And that’s true whether you sell group, individual, or Medicare products.
This will come as a surprise to absolutely none of you, but, according to Forbes, “Healthcare Consumers Lack Knowledge Of Basic Health Insurance Terms.” Actually, that’s the name of a December 3 article that summarizes the findings of a recently released survey by Policygenius that shows, among other things, just “how challenging health insurance is for many American consumers to understand.”
When the Trump administration decided in 2017 to stop reimbursing insurers for cost-sharing reductions on silver-level plans for those who qualify, carriers responded by raising the price of their silver-level plans across the board, a practice known as “silver loading.”
We recently posted an article entitled “Your place or mine? Where do you sell health insurance?”. In it, we discussed the pros and cons of meeting clients at their homes or places of business versus having them meet you in your office. The article made the assumption that all agents have an office that they go to, but that’s definitely not the case. Some very successful agents have made the decision to work from home, foregoing an outside office and the benefits that come with it. In this article, we’ll take a look at some of the benefits of working out of your house.
