Debuting With Health Care Rollout: A New Way Of Calculating Benefits

Along with the healthcare exchanges, the Affordable Care Act is also rolling out an entirely new way to calculate eligibility for benefits for low income people, such as Medicaid.

People who sign up for healthcare through the new exchanges have to use this new mechanism to find out how much subsidy they are eligible for.

Health care consultant Jon Kingsdale says the idea is that instead of days and weeks and paper-based records, this will be an hour-long, real time, automated procedure.

But, he says, it means that there are two big programs debuting today, and the eligibility mechanism has an extra complication: it creates a national system and database that states are putting into practice.