The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) is updating the federal clearance it needs to keep asking mini-med health plans and expatriate plans about their operations.
CMS, an arm the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), talks about its plans for the quarterly mini-med and expat plan reports in a notice seeking comments on the reports.
The federal Paperwork Reduction Act of 1995 requires CMS to get permission from the Office of Management and Budget before collecting information from the public.
The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (PPACA) now requires most non-grandfathered plans to spend at least 85% of large group revenue and 80% of individual and small group revenue on health care and quality improvement efforts.
Issuers and sponsors of mini-med plans – medical plans that typically offer less than $100,000 in annual benefits – argued that applying the medical loss ratio (MLR) requirements to the plans would eliminate the plans.
The plans are not major medical insurance, but they are the best plans that many individuals and employers can afford between now and 2014, when new PPACA subsidies and plan marketing rules are supposed to kick in, mini-med plans defenders said.