NEWS FLASH

HHS Confirms It Will Establish A Federal Exchange | The Affordable Care Act allows the federal government to build a health insurance exchange for states that refuse to establish their own marketplaces. But the limited funding for a federal exchange may have led some governors to believe that HHS would not have the ability to live up to that promise and they’ve flouting the law’s requirements in the hopes that reform will never come to fruition. Well yesterday, the HHS official in charge of overseeing the creation of insurance exchanges emphasized “that a federal exchange will be ready to step in to the extent states don’t have their own new marketplaces ready to offer insurance choices to the uninsured by Jan. 1, 2014.” “‘There’s been a lot of backing and forthing in the press saying the feds won’t do it, it’s not going to happen, we don’t have the ability. Well, I’m here to tell you all of that isn’t true,’ Tim Hill told a health care conference sponsored by the American Bar Association (ABA).” In other words, states that fail to build their own exchanges will be inviting federal intervention — the very thing they say they are trying to prevent by avoiding implementation of the law.