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ST Medical Monday: Discussing the Affordable Care Act with Mike Rhoads of the State Insurance Dept.

Aired on Monday, September 12th.

On this edition of StudioTulsa Medical Monday, we run a status check, so to speak, on the Affordable Care Act, both here in our state and nationwide. The ACA, or "Obamacare," which became law in 2010 -- and which really started to take effect in 2014 -- will hold its fourth cycle of "open enrollment" in November. "Open enrollment" is when participants think about renewing their health insurance, making changes to their coverage, and/or buying such coverage for the first time. But there have been some drastic changes to the health-insurance marketplace lately -- such as the recent news that industry giant Aetna is pulling out of 11 of the 15 Obamacare exchanges for 2017 -- and so the forthcoming "open enrollment" period might prove especially vexing. Our guest on today's show sheds some light on such matters; we are joined by Mike Rhoads, the Health and Life Insurance Deputy Commissioner at the State of Oklahoma's Insurance Department. He's an insurance and banking executive with 30+ years of combined experience in those industries, and he retired from Blue Cross Blue Shield of Oklahoma in 2008 after serving that company in a range of capacities for 25 years.

Rich Fisher passed through KWGS about thirty years ago, and just never left. Today, he is the general manager of Public Radio Tulsa, and the host of KWGS’s public affairs program, StudioTulsa, which celebrated its twentieth anniversary in August 2012 . As host of StudioTulsa, Rich has conducted roughly four thousand long-form interviews with local, national, and international figures in the arts, humanities, sciences, and government. Very few interviews have gone smoothly. Despite this, he has been honored for his work by several organizations including the Governor's Arts Award for Media by the State Arts Council, a Harwelden Award from the Arts & Humanities Council of Tulsa, and was named one of the “99 Great Things About Oklahoma” in 2000 by Oklahoma Today magazine.
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