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November 13, 2014 at 11:35 AM
Officials at the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) have tried to provide an official answer to a burning Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) question: Why has the Small Health Options Program (SHOP) done so poorly?
GAO investigators prepared a report on the SHOP plan system at the request of Rep. Sam Graves, chairman of the House Small Business Committee. The investigators tried to find out just how the SHOP plans have actually performed, factors responsible for their performance, and ways to improve their performance in the coming year.
PPACA drafters created the SHOP system in an effort to offer small employers access to the same kinds of competitive, transparent markets and access to tax breaks that the PPACA individual exchange system provides for individuals. The state-based PPACA exchanges and the PPACA exchanges managed by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) now have more than 7 million paying customers enrolled in individual exchange “qualified health plans” (QHPs).
One finding: Even GAO investigators are unable to get data of any kind from HHS and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) on enrollment in SHOP QHPs. CMS, an arm of HHS, told the GAO that it hopes to have 2014 SHOP enrollment figures in early 2015, John Dicken, a GAO director, wrote in a summary of the GAO’s findings.
Investigators have found that the state-based QHPs have gotten about 76,000 employees, spouses and dependent children into SHOP plans. About 12,000 employers offer SHOP plans.
At the state level, the number of people known to be in state-based SHOP plans ranges from 42 in Washington state up to 33,696 in Vermont, which now requires all small groups to get their coverage through its SHOP exchange. New York and California, which both have new SHOP exchanges and no requirements for employers to use the SHOP system, each have about 10,000 people enrolled in SHOP plans.
For some of the GAO’s insights into what went wrong — and screenshots of some of the good parts, read on.
1. Exchange program managers took too long to make key SHOP plan features available.
One of the features PPACA supporters used to get the bill that became PPACA through Congress was that exchange users, including workers at small employers, would be able to choose from a menu of health plans.
