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Millions May Qualify for Special Enrollment

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

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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2017 Year-End Wrap Up

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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New People Are Signing Up For Marketplace Coverage

In the insurance industry, we all know that the main reason to purchase health insurance is because we’re unable to predict the future. Unexpected and potentially catastrophic injuries and illnesses do happen, and when they do, people with health insurance tend to fare much better financially than those without.
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What’s the latest on the Cost Sharing Subsidies?

With all of the news about the CSR (Cost Sharing Reduction) payments, which President Trump halted on October 12, your clients are probably asking you to explain what exactly happened and, more importantly, how it affects them. It’s easy to understand why they might be confused—this is a political issue, so many of the reports on the topic are one-sided arguments from people who may have their own agenda.
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Don’t Forget About the Individual Mandate!

It’s now been a year since the 2016 presidential election and nearly ten months since inauguration day. By now, most of us expected major portions of the Affordable Care Act to be repealed and thought the individual mandate would be one of the first parts to go. That hasn’t happened, of course, which means that our clients are still required to purchase health insurance or face a penalty under the ACA’s shared responsibility provision.
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Will they really let Obamacare fail?

By now, everyone’s heard the news: the Republican efforts to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act have failed in the Senate. After three unsuccessful votes—first on the Better Care Reconciliation Act, then on a repeal and delay bill, then on a skinny repeal—majority leader Mitch McConnell declared on July 27 that “it’s time to move on.” For now, repeal & replace is dead, though the efforts could certainly be revived sometime in the future.
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Is the Individual Mandate Going Away? (and what happens if it does?)

There are a lot of really good reasons to purchase health insurance:
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The Individual Mandate’s Tax Filing Requirements

As we approach the end of tax season, there’s a lot of confusion about the tax filing requirements under the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate, largely because Americans have received mixed messages about what the rules actually are.
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Humana Pulls Out of Insurance Marketplace

Humana’s been making a lot of news lately. On January 23, a federal judge blocked the proposed $37 billion merger between Humana and Aetna. On February 14, the companies announced that they wouldn’t appeal the ruling and that that they were walking away from the deal they’d been working on for the last year-and-a-half. Then, later that same day, Humana made news once again when it announced that it would not be participating in the Obamacare exchanges in 2018. While the company will presumably continue to offer plans outside the Marketplace, it won’t be selling individual health plans eligible for a government subsidy through the federal or state exchanges.
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