Final

Issued by: Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS)

Issue Date: August 27, 2015

Program Area: Small Business Health Options Program (SHOP)

Question: For the Federally-facilitated Small Business Health Options Program (FF-SHOP) 2015 Enrollment/Reconciliation process, are issuers to add blanks or pipes for fields that do not take up the maximum characters? Will the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) require 15 spaces between pipes for a field with a minimum length of 1 and a maximum length of 15?

Answer: (a) If issuers are not sending a value for an optional data element, pipes need to be present for this specific element. Issuers should NOT send blanks between the pipes. (b) If a specific data element has, for example, the requirement of 1 minimum and 15 maximum characters and the real value has only 4 characters, 4 characters will work for the issuer record. The remaining 11 characters (15 - 4 = 11) do not need to be filled in with spaces.

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