Affordable Care Act

By Henry J. Aaron, May 7, 2014 Open enrollment for 2014 insurance coverage under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) ended on March 31. When the White House reported that enrollment had reached the targets, one could almost hear sighs of relief from supporters and gnashing of teeth by opponents. In truth, meeting the enrollment targets made clear only that the …

By Sandhya Somashekhar, April 25, 2014 The government left the door wide open for millions of Americans to be excused from the Affordable Care Act’s requirement that most people must carry health insurance or pay a fine, but so far relatively few have asked for such a pardon. About 77,000 families and individuals have requested exemptions from the health-care law’s …

Now that the initial dust has settled on the first round of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) enrollment, and the “who won and lost” discussions have gotten their requisite belaboring by the punditry, the real answers (and additional questions begged by those answers) may lie in the more complicated details: How many have enrolled? The Obama administration …

By Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar, April 7, 2014 WASHINGTON — A growing share of Americans got health insurance as sign-up season for President Barack Obama’s health care law came to a close last month, a major survey released Monday has found. The Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index provides independent validation for White House claims that the law is expanding access, particularly for working people …

In the first part of this series, we broke down the basics of health plans under the Affordable Care Act (ACA also known as ObamaCare). This time, we are going to focus on some of the terminology that is wreaking havoc on employers, employees, and agents alike in determining compliance under the ACA. Three definitions come up on a recurring …

By Alex Wayne, March 16, 2014 WASHINGTON — In Maine, the insurer that has enrolled the most Affordable Care Act customers isn’t the state’s well-established Blue Cross Blue Shield plan, owned by WellPoint Inc. It’s WellPoint’s only rival: Maine Community Health Options, a startup that didn’t exist three years ago. The newcomer, funded primarily by taxpayer money lent under the …

By Tracy Seipel, February 19, 2014 With nearly six weeks to go before open enrollment ends under the new federal health care law, more than 1.7 million Californians have signed up for health coverage since Oct. 1, according to the state’s insurance exchange. Through Feb. 14, the number who bought a private insurance plan on the Covered California exchange shot …

The Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, has so many different moving parts and miniscule pieces that it could be financially devastating for an individual (or a business) that misunderstands. That said, it may be better to break ACA down into sections and ensure that you’re looking at this complex legislation in the right context for you. This article …

By Dan Mangan, February 10, 2014 The federal government announced yet another delay in Obamacare’s rules for employers on Monday, and also weakened requirements for complying with the law. The government will now exempt companies employing between 50 and 100 full-time workers from complying with the mandate that they offer employees affordable health insurance by another year, until 2016. Companies …

By Kelly Kennedy, January 13, 2014 More than half of the almost 2.2 million people who bought health insurance on federal and state exchanges in the past three months are older than 45, records released Monday show. If that trend holds, it could skew the health insurance market as older policyholders that use more health care are not balanced by …