Oregon: FINAL, APPROVED 2019 #ACA premiums: $384 higher for the year due specifically to sabotage

I noted a few weeks ago that the Oregon Division of Financial Regulation had issued their preliminary rulings on 2019 individual and small group market rate filings. At the time, they had whittled down the average requested indy market rate changes from 10.5% down to 7.8%, while leaving the requested small group rate changes the same (around 5-6% on average).

However, they also made sure to note that there was still one more round of reviews to go through before final, approved 2019 rate changes were locked in. Yesterday the OR DFR came out with those, making only slight further changes on the individual market (they bumped Kaiser up by 0.2 points while lowering Providence by 1.1 points). Providence has twice as many enrollees as Kaiser, so this resulted in an overall, weighted statewide average rate increase of 7.3%.

The final small group market rates were changed a bit more--Providence's increase was cut in half, while UnitedHealthcare's hike was cut by a couple of points.

As I noted in my original analysis back in May, Oregon carriers have stated that 2019 premiums would be significantly lower if not for Congressional Republicans repealing the ACA's individual mandate and Donald Trump ripping away restrictions on non-ACA compliant #ShortAssPlans, to the tune of around 6.1 percentage points.

That translates into an extra $32/month per enrollee, or $384 more for all of 2019 for unsubsidized enrollees purely due to sabotage factors.