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    CHIP FINALLY Gets Reauthorized

    March 5, 2018
    The Children’s Health Insurance Program, or CHIP, has been in the news recently as lawmakers debate the future of this popular safety net program for children of lower-income families. The program, which has been around since 1997, has enjoyed nearly universal bipartisan support from the beginning, but that support has come into question recently as Congress allowed funding for CHIP to expire four months ago and seemed to be in no hurry to reauthorize it. As worried parents waited to see what our lawmakers would do, CHIP reauthorization took a back seat to tax reform.
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    Medicare Premiums Vary By Income

    February 22, 2018
    If you sell Medicare supplements, Medicare Advantage plans, or Medicare Part D prescription drug plans, you’ve probably been asked on multiple occasions how much Medicare Part B costs. If you’re like a lot of agents, you may have answered with the standard Part B premium amount, which is $134 per month in 2018. This can be dangerous.
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    Congress Postpones Three ACA Taxes

    February 16, 2018
    For the past several years, the insurance industry has been urging Congress to eliminate three unpopular taxes that were designed to help pay for the Affordable Care Act. They finally listened… sort of. While the taxes have not been eliminated, the House and Senate did vote to postpone the Health Insurance Tax (HIT), the tax on High Cost Health Plans, better known as the Cadillac Tax, and the Durable Medical Equipment (DME) Tax. This was part of the January 22 deal to keep the government open for three weeks. The same bill also reauthorized the Children’s Health Insurance Plan (CHIP) for six years.
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    Medicare Part D Notification Requirements for Your Group Clients

    February 5, 2018
    If you sell group health insurance, there are a couple Medicare notification requirements your clients need to be aware of. The law requires that companies whose group health plans include prescription drug coverage to notify Medicare-eligible policyholders whether their prescription drug benefit is “creditable,” which means that the coverage is expected to pay on average as much as the standard Medicare prescription drug coverage.
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    Dependent Rates Soar in 2018

    February 1, 2018
    As you probably noticed during this year’s open enrollment period, the rates for children under age 21 have increased significantly, forcing many clients to ask if there’s another option. This is true for both individual and small group plans, and its cause dates back to some regulations issued by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in December of 2016.
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    Is the ACA Really Dead?

    January 26, 2018
    One year into Donald Trump’s presidency, most would agree that his biggest legislative victory is the recently-passed tax reform legislation. Tax reform was a top priority for the new president, and the bill’s passage helps President Trump fulfill an important campaign promise. Two promises actually:
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    Millions May Qualify for Special Enrollment

    January 19, 2018
    As you know, the Affordable Care Act gives people the opportunity to purchase or change health coverage during the ACA’s individual open enrollment period. And, as you also know, the 2018 open enrollment period was only half as long as last year’s. For 2017 plans, people had three months to sign up; for 2018, they only had six weeks. The open enrollment period officially closed December 15, 2017.
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    Status of the Individual and Employer Mandates

    January 8, 2018
    When the Affordable Care Act was signed into law nearly eight years ago, there was a lot of criticism about a number of different provisions. Some said that the guaranteed issue rule, while noble in its goal to allow anyone who wants health insurance to buy health insurance, would lead to adverse selection and higher insurance rates. Others said that the premium tax credits and expanded Medicaid would blow up the budget. And still others said that the modified adjusted community rating provision would hurt a carrier’s ability to rate based on risk. Even with all that criticism, it could be argued that the two most controversial and unpopular provisions of the massive health care law were the individual and employer mandates. And now, eight years later, those two provisions are both in the news again.
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    CVS to Purchase Aetna

    January 5, 2018
    By now you’ve certainly heard the news: CVS has announced plans to purchase Aetna for a record $69 billion, the largest-ever merger in the health insurance industry. CVS currently has roughly 10,000 pharmacies, and, if approved, the deal would allow the pharmacy giant to offer health care services and prescriptions to Aetna’s 22 million members.
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    2017 Year-End Wrap Up

    December 27, 2017
    As we near the end of another year, it’s time to close the books on 2017 and look ahead to 2018. As we do, it’s helpful to review the big news stories from the last 12 months and determine whether they’ll carry over to the next calendar year or just be interesting moments in history that we can look back on but stop worrying about.
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