2017 Rate Request Early Look: South Carolina

As of 2014, South Carolina's total individual market was roughly 201,000 people, including grandfathered & transitional enrollees. 205,000 people were enrolled in exchange policies as of the end of March 2016; when you add off-exchange enrollees, it's likely closer to 250K, of which I'd imagine 225K or so are ACA-compliant. The enrollment numbers below therefore should reflect roughly 70% of the ACA-compliant market.

To calculate the Blue Cross Blue Shield average percentage, I had to do a bit of guesswork as to the proportion of their 116,000 enrollees between the 3 different types of plans (BlueEssentials, Multistate and Catastrophic). BlueEssentials is the highest of the three (14.74%), but also likely holds the vast majority (I'd guess 95% or more); usually very few people select Catastrophic plans, and I don't think many go for Multistate either. Therefore, I'm eyeballing the overall average at around 14.4%.

Since BCBS also holds about 3/4 of the market share, that means that SC is coming in lower than average...for 2017.