Moreover, healthcare plans will no longer be required to cover COVID-19 testing and vaccines without cost sharing (i.e., co-pays and deductibles), prior authorization, or other medical management requirements. If the public health emergency ends as expected in May, many workers who had qualified for Medicaid may no longer qualify, depending on where they live. Given this uncertainty, and for administrative ease, plan sponsors may decide to extend the suspended timeframes through the end of the calendar year. However, the US Department of Labor has provided verbal, informal guidance to stakeholders indicating their intention to end the Outbreak Period on July 10, 2023, consistent with earlier guidance. Any suspended time frames for electing and paying for COBRA coverage are currently set to end 60 days after the end of the national emergency (Outbreak Period). The end of the presidential declaration of national emergency will likely have the greatest impact on COBRA qualified beneficiaries. Employers should be prepared to respond to inquiries from employees regarding changes in coverage and related deadlines. Morgan Lewis recently summarized these changes and the next steps for plan sponsors. The biggest impact of the end of the emergency declarations will be the changes to COVID-19 medical benefits. As such, employers may wish to take stock of their COVID-19 policies and reevaluate those that touch on benefits, vaccine and testing requirements, and other safety measures. However, based on comments from the Biden administration, that too is set to expire on May 11. The COVID-19 federal public health emergency-a separate declaration by the Secretary of Health and Human Services from January 2020-remains in effect for now. Additionally, data fixes and improvements may lead to certain previously displayed data to be updated with more accurate or complete information.President Biden signed into law a House bill on April 10 that immediately ended the COVID-19 presidential declaration of national emergency established in March 2020. Explanations are provided within the dashboards when these circumstances arise. However, this type of information is continuously being updated as new information becomes available through ongoing public health case investigation and outreach. For example, only partial demographic information may be available for some cases at a particular point in time. This can lead to circumstances where information is available in some contexts, but not others. New Hampshire's goal is to provide accurate and up-to-date information as quickly as possible. Why don't all metrics match exactly between dashboards and between days when the dashboard is viewed? Data may be suppressed in these circumstances to avoid misrepresenting population level trends. "Rate Not Reliable": When calculating rates (for example, the percentage of the population tested) there are circumstances where the data become so small that they are likely to lack statistical significance when making comparisons."Data Not Reported": In addition to data suppression, certain sub-divisions of the data are simply not reported as a matter of policy (for example, data for towns with populations of less than 100) to further protect the privacy of individuals.In some circumstances, data becomes so granular that data is suppressed when numbers are small to protect the privacy of the underlying individuals. "Data Suppressed": The dashboards contain extremely detailed and granular information.New Hampshire's general suppression principles are described below. In each case, the reason is explained on the dashboard. There are several circumstances where specific data cannot be shown on the dashboards.
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