Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act; exchange and insurance market standards for 2015 and beyond. Final rule.

This final rule addresses various requirements applicable to health insurance issuers, Affordable Insurance Exchanges (``Exchanges''), Navigators, non-Navigator assistance personnel, and other entities under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010 (collectively referred to as the Affordable Care Act). Specifically, the rule establishes standards related to product discontinuation and renewal, quality reporting, non-discrimination standards, minimum certification standards and responsibilities of qualified health plan (QHP) issuers, the Small Business Health Options Program, and enforcement remedies in Federally-facilitated Exchanges. It also finalizes: A modification of HHS's allocation of reinsurance collections if those collections do not meet our projections; certain changes to allowable administrative expenses in the risk corridors calculation; modifications to the way we calculate the annual limit on cost sharing so that we round this parameter down to the nearest $50 increment; an approach to index the required contribution used to determine eligibility for an exemption from the shared responsibility payment under section 5000A of the Internal Revenue Code; grounds for imposing civil money penalties on persons who provide false or fraudulent information to the Exchange and on persons who improperly use or disclose information; updated standards for the consumer assistance programs; standards related to the opt-out provisions for self-funded, non-Federal governmental plans and related to the individual market provisions under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 including excepted benefits; standards regarding how enrollees may request access to non-formulary drugs under exigent circumstances; amendments to Exchange appeals standards and coverage enrollment and termination standards; and time-limited adjustments to the standards relating to the medical loss ratio (MLR) program. The majority of the provisions in this rule are being finalized as proposed.

State Standards for Insurance Access to Oncologists.

As the market for health insurance plans expands, each state is responsible for setting standards to ensure that plans contain adequate coverage for cancer care. Little is currently known about what criteria states use for network adequacy of insurance plans. We contacted representatives of the Department of Insurance (or equivalent) for 50 states and the District of Columbia, as well as searched official state websites to compile data on network adequacy standards for cancer care nationwide. The standards of 16 (31.4%) states contained only qualitative elements for access to an oncologist (eg, "reasonable access"), 7 (13.7%) states included only quantitative elements (eg, travel distance and time restrictions), and 24 (47.1%) states included standards with both qualitative and quantitative elements. Standards from 4 states were not available. States should make certain that robust, transparent protections exist to ensure that patients are able to access high-quality cancer care without experiencing the financial toxicity associated with out-of-network billing.

The Massachusetts Commonwealth Health Insurance Connector: structure and functions.

The Commonwealth Health Insurance Connector Authority is the centerpiece of Massachusetts' ambitious health care reforms, which were implemented beginning in 2006. The Connector is an independent quasi-governmental agency created by the Massachusetts legislature to facilitate the purchase of affordable, high-quality health insurance by small businesses and individuals without access to employer-sponsored coverage. This issue brief describes the structure and functions of the Connector, providing a primer to policymakers interested in exploring similar reforms at the state and national level. The authors describe how the Connector works to promote administrative ease, eliminate paperwork, offer portability of coverage, and provide some standardization and choice of plans. National policymakers looking to achieve similar policy goals may find some of the structural components and functions of the Connector to be transferable to a national health reform model, say the authors.

Pay-for-performance and accountability: related themes in improving health care.

Value-based purchasing, or pay-for-performance, is a major emerging theme in U.S. health care. Forces enhancing adoption of pay-for-performance programs include continued increases in medical costs beyond overall economic growth, a body of evidence that the quality of health care provided to patients is not directly related to the volume of services received, increasing evidence to serve as a basis for the development of standards against which to measure clinical performance, and increasing acceptance by physician organizations and individual practitioners of the rationale underlying these efforts. In this context, employers, government payers, and health plans are establishing a wide variety of pay-for-performance programs. This article reviews the critical design features of such efforts, describes the current types of programs on offer, and comments on the implications of this emerging movement for the future of health care in the United States.

Medical consultant key to dealing effectively with insurance fraud and abuse.

An unexpected, but everpresent, by-product of the development of the health care insurance industry is the tendency of those using the industry's services to "game" the system. While fraud and abuse in the claiming of insurance benefits are not the only or the most significant cause of steeply rising health care costs, they certainly contribute to the problem. Payers are advised to maintain a sharp eye for potential fraud and abuse and to observe some simple rules for detecting and eliminating them.