HealthSource RI director: ACA has ‘basic problems’

WASHINGTON – HealthSource RI Director Christine Ferguson participated in a panel discussion here recently that examined progress states have made in implementing health-insurance exchanges.
Hosted by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Jan. 31 forum brought together representatives of some of the most successful state exchanges: Kentucky, Rhode Island, California, and the District of Columbia.
Ferguson noted at the event that too much attention had been given to enrollment and not enough to “lessons learned,” saying that books will be written, and should be written, about those lessons. She noted, for one, that people are getting caught on one side of the Medicaid-eligibility divide or the other, and that getting them back to the correct side once an error is determined to exist requires time-consuming manual corrections by HealthSource RI staff.
“There are really basic problems in the basic law of the ACA that need to be cleaned up,” Ferguson said. “And if we don’t clean them up in the next year or so, there are going to be ramifications to that. They relate to eligibility; they relate to the implementation of the law; and they tie everybody’s hands because we can’t get agreement on moving forward.” •

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