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July 2012
In This Issue
Essential Health Benefits
New Exchange Director Hired
 
Tools You Can Use:

 

 Visit our
page for other useful tools and publications, now available in Spanish and Portuguese.

 

 

Check out Healthcare.gov for information on how the ACA works for all of our communities. Fact sheets and brochures written for specific populations, in English and Spanish available. 

 
The Rhode Island Health Coverage Project, an initiative of The Economic Progress Institute and Rhode Island KIDS COUNT, works to ensure that the consumer voice is present as the state makes decisions about health care reform. 
 

 

 
 

EHBSpotlight on the ACA:  

What's Covered by Your Insurance Plan? Defining the Essential Health Benefits 


 To ensure that health plans provide benefits to their enrollees that will meet their health care needs, the ACA requires plans to provide a set of "Essential Health Benefits" (EHBs). Individual and small group plans sold in the Exchange and outside of the Exchange must include these categories of benefits.   

 

The ACA requires that Essential Health Benefits cover 10 categories -- for example, ambulatory patient services, maternity and newborn care, mental health and substance abuse services and habilitative care, pediatric dental and vision care -- but does not define the type of services or items that must be provided in each category.

 

Rhode Island is currently in the process of choosing one of the small group plans offered in our state as the benchmark plan which will define the services. By September 30, 2012 the state needs to submit its EHB plan to the federal government.  To help guide this decision, the state has established a Work Group where consumers and other stakeholders can provide input. 

 

Before making a final decision, the state will publish recommendations regarding the EHB.  These recommendations will be posted for public comment.

 

Read our fact sheet for more information about EHBs and how you can give your input to the state as it decides on Rhode Island's EHBs.

 

 

New Director of the Health Benefits Exchange Hired

 

In late June, Governor Chafee appointed Christy Ferguson to serve as Director of the Rhode Island's Health Benefits Exchange.  Christy was most recently a professor at George Washington University in Washington DC. She is a national expert on health care reform and as a former Director of the RI Department of Human Services from 1995-2011, she brings expertise in Medicaid coverage.  As Deputy Chief of Staff for the late U.S. Sen. John  Chafee in the 1990s and later as Massachusetts Public Health Commissioner under then-Gov. Mitt Romney, Ferguson worked on developing health care proposals that later became models for the ACA. 

 

You can read more about Christy here.