Final regulations for “minimum creditable coverage” (MCC) tighten up the individual mandate beginning in 2009.
This summer, MassHealth starting enforcing the rule that households who hadn’t paid their premium bills for 60 days or more would lose their MassHealth or Children’s Medical Security Program (CMSP) coverage. Members of these households may be starting to show up at hospitals and health centers, they may have no coverage, and they can’t get the Health Safety Net.
Agencies propose changes to health care reform.
"Outreach & enrollment" means much more than putting up posters and helping people fill out MassHealth applications. Recently, over the course of a two hour appointment, my supervisor and I counseled one household on eleven different public health insurance, subsidy and care programs. We helped them file four separate applications to five different insurance programs, putting together a patchwork of care options to cover the hole left by the loss of employer-sponsored insurance.
This month, outreach workers gave some powerful examples of how the Commonwealth Care Open Enrollment process has added some new twists to the problem of access to providers.
Our last Boston HAN meeting came in the wake of the Connector Board’s decisions to shift more of the costs of Health Care Reform to consumers by raising co-pays and premiums for Commonwealth Care. Advocates continue to oppose these cost increases and push for sharing the costs more evenly with businesses. Meanwhile, outreach and enrollment workers are seeing an increase in administrative barriers to enrollment in Commonwealth Care and MassHealth.
A new pamphlet offers step-by-step guidance, just in time for taxes.
Outreach workers do the hard work of explaining policy changes to real people, so often they are among the first to hear feedback about how they are working. Not surprisingly, this was a theme of the Western Mass. Health Access Network meeting this February, when we gathered with outreach and enrollment workers from Berkshire, Franklin, Hampshire and Hampden counties. HAN members doing enrollment agreed that there is still confusion and frustration in their communities.
A new flyer helps explain the timeline.
It's been reported that over the past year more than about 200,000 Massachusetts residents have been provided access to comprehensive public health insurance: either through Commonwealth Care or MassHealth. What about those who aren't eligible for publicly subsidized programs and must enroll in employer-sponsored plans?
The increased cost of insuring employees and their families has forced many local employers to make hard choices about their insurance offerings.
