Health insurance exchanges can now partner up to help ease the process

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health insurance exchangesThe HHS has announced the first of the approved partnerships between federal and state governments.

The Department of Health and Human Services has given their conditional approval to the first of the states that have opted to run health insurance exchanges in a partnership between the federal and state governments.

The HHS is hoping that there will soon be additional approvals of this nature to be issued.

Arkansas and Delaware have become the first states in receipt of the conditional approval for the operation of health insurance exchanges that are state-federal partnerships. According to the federal government, the states that have chosen to work with them in order to create their online marketplaces for 2014 will be able to keep a certain degree of autonomy while they still reduce the operational costs to the state.

However, many health insurance regulation issues will still need to be hammered out between them.

Other issues will also need to be agreed upon, including the role that physicians will play. At the time this article was written, there had been 19 states, as well as the District of Columbia, that had received their approval from the HHS in order to design and implement their own health insurance exchanges, based on the models that they had submitted. These will allow the residents of those states to shop for their plans under the Affordable Care Act’s options, which will be put into place in 2014.

While the majority of those states will be exclusively behind the wheel of their health insurance marketplaces, Arkansas and Delaware are now the first to begin a partnership deal so that the responsibilities will be split between the federal government and themselves.

This is not necessarily the last of the states that will be participating in these health insurance exchange partnerships. The remainder still have up until February 15 in order to decide whether they would like to pursue such a joint venture with the federal government. After that point, if the states are not functioning on their own and do not intend to enter into a partnership, then the federal government will take over the responsibility of establishing those marketplaces.

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