President Obama's administration said Friday that it will stop accepting applications for waivers from the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act's minimum coverage requirements after September 22, 2011.
The act generally prohibits health insurance issuers and group health plan sponsors from providing less than $750,000 in coverage benefits in a health plan.
[See also: Pressure continues against health reform waivers]
Under the waiver program, issuers or other group health plan sponsors could apply for a waiver from the annual limits if they presented evidence that meeting the annual limits would result in diminished access to benefits or a significant increase in premiums. To implement the program, the Department of Health and Human Services created what is now called the Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight (CCIIO).
Waivers provide exemptions from the new healthcare law for many employers and labor unions that offer extremely basic coverage, some as low as $10,000. Groups that currently have waivers can keep them until 2014 provided that they seek extensions by the September deadline and meet transparency requirements.
The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) recently conducted a review of annual limit waiver requests at the direction of the Department of Defense and Full-Year Continuing Appropriations Act for Fiscal Year 2011.
Key review findings as of April 25, 2011, include:
• CCIIO received a total of 1,415 applications for a waiver of restrictions related to annual limitations on health benefits.
• CCIIO approved over 95 percent, or 1,347, of the applications covering all plans in the applications.
• For another 25 applications, CCIIO approved waivers for some plans and denied waivers for others within the same application.
• CCIIO denied waivers covering all plans in 40 applications.