The Commonwealth Fund is distributing a paper on how states have implemented the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) premium rate rules.
Justin Giovannelli, a researcher at the Georgetown University Health Policy Institute, and two colleagues have described how each state is tweaking the PPACA individual health insurance age-rating, geographic rating area and tobacco surcharge provisions.
PPACA now prohibits health insurers from using personal health information in decisions about whether to issue coverage, and it forbids insurers from using personal health information other than age and tobacco use when pricing the coverage. The law also limits insurers to charging the oldest enrollees three times more than it charges the youngest enrollees.
Giovannelli and his colleagues found that some states adopted tighter age-rating and tobacco surcharge rules than PPACA requires.
See also: D.C. exchange bars tobacco surcharge