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Health Insurance

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health care woman and doctor

Bringing Health Care Prices to Light

Consumers are often in the dark when it comes to health care prices—and they’re not the only ones. Policymakers, employers and researchers frequently lack access to robust price data, which can act as a barrier for assessing health care markets and controlling costs.

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Health providers

Health Insurance Resources

This webpage provides an overview of NCSL resources for health insurance policy, including: webpages relating to private insurance and the Affordable Care Act (ACA), NCSL’s health innovations legislative database, recent publications, a glossary of common private health insurance terms, and other resources.

HEALTH INSURANCE

Health Insurance

All Documents

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Overview

Back in 2013 some 197 million Americans had commercial or private market health insurance, through employers, individual purchases or policies with public subsidies. Since then federal health reform has added to existing state regulation, mandates and consumer protections. ACA-authorized Health insurance Marketplaces or Exchanges led to about 12 million individuals obtaining new health policies between October 2013 and winter 2018 and an HHS calculation of 218 million with such coverage. The past two years included complexities with the repeal of the individual mandate to have insurance and the administration decision to withhold all payments for lower-income subsidies termed "CSR" payments. Large employers continue to have a requirement to offer health insurance, while smaller employers can obtain an incentive subsidy if they opt to offer coverage. NCSL has extensive information describing current laws, pending bills and latest federal guidance and rules from HHS.