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CMS on Thursday significantly changed how Affordable Care Act exchanges will run, including allowing states to waive some requirements and to use web-based brokers to sell insurance by 2023, moves that insurers and other industry groups have said would essentially privatize the exchanges. In its annual benefit and payment parameters rule, the agency said states will be able to use Section 1332 waivers to individualize their exchanges and eliminate some statutory requirements. States will be allowed to add web-based brokers as the primary way that residents enroll in individual market plans. The agency put the onus on states to ensure those brokers and insurers meet any eligibility requirements. (1/14)

CMS has finalized a number of proposals in its rule governing the ACA's exchanges in 2022, including lower user fees. In the final rule, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) set user fees for qualified health plans at 2.25% of the premium, down from 3%. The agency said that steadily cutting down user fees since 2018 has allowed it to decrease premiums by 8%. The rule would also set fees for state-based exchanges that use Healthcare.gov to 1.75%, down from 2.25%. (Minemyer, 1/14)

Advocates for the federal health insurance program known as Obamacare filed a lawsuit Thursday challenging Georgia’s plan to block access to coverage through the program’s online marketplace. The federal lawsuit argues that in allowing Georgia to ignore certain provisions of the Affordable Care Act, the Trump administration was illegally attempting to gut the law, which has withstood repeated challenges in Congress and the courts. “Millions of Americans have bought insurance on the ACA’s exchanges,” said John Lewis, senior counsel with the Washington-based organization Democracy Forward and the lead lawyer on the lawsuit. “I would hate to see another state pursue the same thing that Georgia’s trying to pursue.” (Hart, 1/14)

A Planned Parenthood affiliate and an Atlanta women’s health center have sued the Trump administration to block its approval of Georgia’s plan to stop using the Affordable Care Act’s healthcare.gov health insurance exchange. In a complaint filed Thursday in Washington, D.C., federal court against the Department of Health and Human Services, Planned Parenthood Southeast and Feminist Women’s Health Center said the plan would harm them because more of their patients would be uninsured. (Pierson, 1/14)

Louisiana saw its fifth annual drop in health insurance enrollment through the individual marketplace set up through President Barack Obama’s federal health overhaul law. The Advocate reports that enrollment in the Affordable Care Act’s individual market fell to 83,159 this year, down from 87,748 policyholders last year. The program offers income-based, taxpayer-subsidized private health insurance plans for people who aren’t covered on the job. (1/14)