It’s a busy month on the essential health benefits
front! As we’ve noted, one option
for states under the proposed approach for state-defined EHB packages is to use
one of the state’s three largest small group plans as a benchmark. It’s been difficult to evaluate this
proposal because we didn’t know which plans were the three largest in each
state–even state insurance commissions don’t always have this information.
Well, on Wednesday, HHS released a list of what it
believes to be the three largest small group plans for every state. It relies on data insurers submitted to
Healthcare.gov from June of 2011.
The list comes with many disclaimers, so we can’t take it as the
official small group choices for states, but it’s a start.
This info is useful to have, but we still need to know
more about these plans to fully evaluate the EHB proposal. We need to know exactly what the plans
cover and what they exclude. The
list of plan names from HHS at least gives us a place to start in digging up
that information.