Raise the Bar: State-Based Marketplaces Using Quality Tools to Enhance Health Equity

The Affordable Care Act is a monumental act that has increased access and affordability to comprehensive health care coverage for millions of Americans. The ACA also included a number of reforms to improve health care quality. In the commercial sector, two federal programs, the Quality Improvement Strategy (QIS) program and the Quality Rating System, monitor health care quality and require insurers to design programs to improve quality.

Policymakers at the state and federal level have begun to leverage these programs to advance health equity. They are targeting long-standing racial and ethnic disparities in health quality, such as lower rates of cervical cancer screening rates for Asian Americans and lower antidepressant medication adherence among patients of racial and ethnic minority groups.

In a new post for the Commonwealth Fund’s To the Point blog, CHIR’s Jalisa Clark and Christine H. Monahan describe how Washington and California’s quality programs are focusing on equity and highlight opportunities for other state-based marketplaces to similarly strengthen their own quality programs, and for CMS to raise standards across SBMs. You can read the full post here.