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Apparently, the Obama administration has set a pretty high bar for what constitutes “Essential Health Benefits". Technology company HealthPocket examined 11,000 individual health plans across the U.S. to determine how many of them met the Affordable Care Criteria criteria for standard coverage – and less than 2% passed.
Beginning in 2014, every qualified health plan must offer minimum categories of health insurance coverage under the rules of the health care reform law. But on average, the health plans provided just 76% of the ACA’s Essential Health Benefits (see chart).
Among the findings in the HealthPocket study:
HealthPocket also speculated that the coverage expansion required by the ACA could cause health care premiums to rise in 2014, due to such factors as: