Every Medicare open enrollment season, health insurers, brokers and other third parties use a blitz of TV ads to attract enrollees to Medicare Advantage plans from among the 65 million people with Medicare. We watched more than a thousand ads and conducted focus groups to better understand the marketing effort and its impact on beneficiaries.…More

Six months into the unwinding of the Medicaid continuous enrollment provision, KFF tracking shows states are reporting outcomes for over 28 million renewals, accounting for three in ten people who were enrolled as of March 2023 when continuous enrollment ended. This policy watch examines the latest data and key questions as the unwinding continues to unfold.

Proposed updates to federal mental health parity rules would make wide ranging changes to current standards that apply to private insurance and coverage provided by most employers. This issue brief focuses on one aspect of the new proposal—a requirement that plans perform an “outcome analysis” before they can place certain restrictions on behavioral health coverage. This would require that plans evaluate specific data to determine the impact of certain restrictions on behavioral health access, such as prior authorization rules or limited provider network access. The use of data analysis as an oversight tool would be new for federal insurance regulators. The brief discusses this new proposed tool and the key policy questions that it triggers.