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April 02, 2013 at 09:51 AM
Managers of the new Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) health insurance exchanges may be able to connect with partners that sell vision insurance, disability insurance, life insurance, long-term care insurance (LTCI) and other ancillary insurance products.
Officials at the Center for Consumer Information & Insurance Oversight (CCIIO), the arm of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) that oversees the exchange programs, give guidelines for ancillary products sales in a set of answers to frequently asked questions (FAQs).
PPACA requires HHS to work with state agencies to make the services of an exchange, or Web-based health insurance supermarket, available to residents of all 50 states and the District of Columbia by Oct. 1.
PPACA authorizes the exchanges to sell “qualified health plans” (QHPs) and stand-alone dental plans.
A PPACA exchange cannot sell any products other than QHPs and stand-alone dental plans, and it can sell QHP coverage and dental coverage only to “qualified individuals and qualified employers,” CCIIO officials said in a FAQ answer.
But a state that’s running an exchange can connect an exchange with “separate state programs that share resources and infrastructure with a state-based exchanged,” and those separate “resource sharing” programs can sell ancillary products, officials said.
An exchange could provide basic information about ancillary products, and it could explain how consumers can go about signing up for the ancillary products through a “separate legally and publicly distinct program,” officials said.
