Strategic Planning & Timelines

In May 2011, Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin signed legislation to implement Green Mountain Care (GMC), a single-payer, publicly financed, universal health care system. Vermont's reform law passed 15 months after the historic federal Affordable Care Act (ACA) became law. In passing reforms, Vermont took matters into its own hands and is well ahead of most other states in its efforts to implement federal and state health care reforms by 2014. Although Vermont is a small state, its reform efforts provide valuable lessons for other states in implementing ACA reforms.

The Pacific Business Group on Health recently released an issue brief touting the top 5 rules for decision support . The list includes strategies that their research indicates will have a large impact on consumers’ plan choice experiences on State Based Exchange (SBE) web portals. 

In this paper, the Rockefeller Institute examines the difficulty in implementing the Affordable Care Act in the face of so many uncertainties. It proposes the creation of a new institutional mechanism to monitor and react to changing conditions and to provide feedback to Congress and the president on necessary adjustments to meet the goals of the legislation.

On March 23, 2010, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was signed into law. While the date for full implementation of most provisions of the law is January 1, 2014, the impact of the ACA can be seen over the past three years. The brief provides an overview of the ACA’s early impacts on private insurance and exchanges, Medicaid coverage, access to primary and preventive care, Medicare, and dually eligible beneficiaries.

The ACA requires a streamlined process for determining eligibility and enrolling applicants in the state health exchanges, Medicaid, and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) by January 1, 2014. This report assesses the states’ readiness to implement the streamlined eligibility and enrollment systems.

With new efforts underway to reform health insurance and improve quality, efficiency, and effectiveness of the U.S. health care system, assessing and planning for an adequate health care workforce is critical to meeting this evolving demands of the system. In this report, Deloitte Center for Health Solutions examines the health care worker demand projections and makes recommendations for modernizing the health care workforce planning framework.

State Refor(u)m has created a chart tracking states’ selection of vendors for their Exchange and/or Medicaid Eligibility and Enrollment IT systems and  the vendors’ roles in building these new systems. This chart also provides information on the software components that these vendors are using and whether states have brought on additional resources, such as developers, program management, and Independent Verification and Validation (IV&V) or Quality Assurance (QA) vendors.

Wakely Consulting Group has prepared this policy brief to aid state Exchanges in the process of certifying, recertifying, de-certifying and managing the relationship with qualified health plans (QHPs).

HHS released this omnibus rule modifying several provisions in Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) intended to enhance patient privacy and protect data. This includes modifications to the Notification Breach rule, HIPAA privacy and security rules as mandated by the Health Information for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act, HIPAA enforcement rule, and the privacy rule in accordance with the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA). 

The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities released a toolkit that aims to help states coordinate their health reform activities with other human service programs. It is designed to help states develop eligibility and enrollment systems and processes that not only meet ACA standards, but also enable enrollees (primarily poor & near-poor families) to access all of the benefits available to them through other programs.