Home Health & Hospice Week

You can celebrate a new pool of insured patients come 2014, just as the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is now celebrating a big countdown to the new Health Insurance Marketplace initiative under the Affordable Care Act that will officially take effect on Jan. 1, 2014. The first countdown, however, is to the open enrollment that will begin on Oct. 1, 2013, according to a recent blog post by HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.

HHS also announced that it launched the newly rebuilt HealthCare.gov, where individuals and small business owners can research and purchase health insurance plans.

"This is an historic time for those Americans who never had health insurance, who had to go without insurance after losing a job or becoming sick, or who had been turned down because of a pre-existing condition," Sebelius states. "Because of these new marketplaces established under the Affordable Care Act, millions of Americans will have new access to affordable health insurance coverage."

In a related announcement on Jan. 17, HHS said that it awarded $1.5 billion in new Exchange Establishment Grants to California, Delaware, Iowa, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, North Carolina, Oregon and Vermont, as part of the Health Insurance Marketplace initiative.