Are you confused about the health insurance exchanges? You may have heard that part of the health reform laws require all states to create their own health insurance exchange that should be up and running by 2014. Most people have a lot of questions about how those exchanges will affect them. There are two great resources that can help you find some answers.
The health insurance exchanges are one of the key parts of the health reform laws. They are intended to be the place where people who do not have health insurance can go in order to find affordable health insurance. Right now, there are a lot of people who cannot get health insurance through their employer, and who also do not qualify for any form of public health insurance. Many are finding it too expensive to purchase individual health insurance through a private insurance company.
The federal government estimates that more than 11 million people will be using the health insurance exchanges to sign up for affordable health insurance in 2014. Most of this group will be those who have low income. By 2018, it is expected that 27 million Americans will have gotten their health insurance through their state’s exchange.
Most people have a reasonable grasp of those basic concepts. However, there is a lot of confusion about exactly how the insurance exchanges are going to affect individuals. When can you sign up? Will there only be one kind of health insurance available, or many? Can your small business use the exchanges to buy policies for employees?
There are two great resources that can help you find the answers to those questions, and more. One is from the Kaiser Family Foundation. This is a nonprofit, private, group that serves as a non-partisan resource of facts, information, and analysis of data. They make the results of their studies and research available to policymakers, the media, the health care community, and the general public.
Another great online resource that can help you understand more about how the insurance exchanges will affect you is the Commonwealth Fund. This private foundation aims to promote a high performing health care system. The want that system to have better access, improved quality, and greater efficiency than what exists right now. The focus is to make sure that society’s most vulnerable, (elderly adults, young children, minority Americans, people with low income, and the uninsured), will have access to a health insurance system that serves their needs.
Each resource has answered some of the most common questions about how the exchanges will function in simple, clear, language. If you have any confusion about how this all is going to affect you, and your family, in 2014, I highly recommend checking out those two resources for answers. It’s always good to know the facts about things that are about to change.
Image by Kate Ter Haar on Flickr