Dive Brief:
- Two new items out from Congressional committees this week shine a spotlight on what has gone wrong in the past year to cause numerous ACA health insurance co-ops to fall like dominoes and the marketplaces to find themselves subject to alarming premium increases.
- The first item by the Energy and Commerce Committee – a review of CMS' management of the co-op program – provides a highly critical list of how the CMS failed the program and contributed there being only six of the original 23 co-ops currently remaining.
- The second item from the Committee on Oversight & Government Reform – a release of testimony of Topher Spiro, vice president for health policy at the Center for American Progress – argues the ACA markets are "not in crisis, with no risk of a death spiral," but undergoing a "one-time correction" in 2017.
Dive Insight:
The Oversight committee's feedback also called for refinement to risk adjustment, among numerous other factors, and both committees also called out a need for enforcement of the rules on Special Enrollment Periods, which have been singled out as a major contributor to unpredictable enrollment figures.