The Affordable Care Act (ACA) requires Marketplace plans to keep people unless they ask to disenroll or stop paying their premiums under a consumer protection called “guaranteed renewability.” This means that people have a right to keep a plan that they are in and their plan cannot drop them because they become older or sicker.
In a recently proposed rule, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) asks whether this protection conflicts with a longstanding Medicare law that prohibits a health plan from selling a policy to a person who already has Medicare. Medicare Rights responded that guaranteed renewability should be maintained, based on both the simple reading of the law and on fundamental fairness.