UPDATE: Ohio: Preliminary 2020 #ACA exchange avg. rate changes: 7.0% *decrease*

The good news about the Ohio Insurnace Dept. is that they make it easy to find out which insurance carriers are participating on the ACA market and what the overall, weighted premium change is statewide.

The bad news is that they don't break out that statewide average by carrier rate changes, nor do they make it easy to find out the actual enrollment in the individual carriers...even on the SERFF database, they don't post the relevant filing forms until much later in the year, and tend to redact the critical data.

Still, the big number in the Buckeye State is a 7.0% average premium decrease year over year for 2020:

Ohio Health Insurance Exchange 2020

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) requires that every state have an exchange where consumers can buy individual health insurance policies.  In Ohio, the federal government runs the health insurance exchange.  Ohioans who do not have health insurance through their employer, Medicare or Medicaid may be eligible to purchase coverage through the exchange.  Open enrollment for coverage next year (2020) is November 1, 2019 to December 15, 2019.  Below is a summary of Ohio’s individual market for 2020.  The data is based on product filings the Ohio Department of Insurance is currently reviewing.

Ohio’s Health Insurance Market (2019–2020):

For 2019, the department approved 10 companies to sell on the exchange. Based on the plan information the Department approved, all 88 counties will have at least one insurer.  Filings show 16 counties with just one insurer and 33 counties with two.   

For 2020, 10 companies have filed to sell on the exchange.  Based on those filings, 29 counties will have two insurers and one county will have just one insurer.  All other Ohio counties will have at least three insurers selling exchange products in 2020.  

Companies who have filed to sell in 2020:

• AultCare Insurance Company
• Buckeye Community Health Plan
• CareSource
• Community Insurance Company
• Medical Health Insuring Corp. of Ohio
• Molina Healthcare of Ohio, Inc.
• Oscar Buckeye State Insurance Corporation
• Oscar Insurance Corporation of Ohio
• Paramount Insurance Company
• Summa Insurance Company 

Product availability by county

Insurer coverage by county

Individual Market Premium Information for 2020:

Following implementation of the ACA, plan options and the premiums associated with those plans underwent significant changes.  Since 2013, the Department has provided information prior to open enrollment each year as plans and premiums change.  In 2019, the weighted average premium for an on-exchange individual market plan was $6,161.56 and for 2020 the weighted average premium based on current filings is $5,730.66 – a decrease of 7.0 percent.

UPDATE: HealthCare.Gov's Rate Review database is now live for 2020, so I was finally able to plug in most (but frustratingly, not all) of the rate change and enrollment data for Ohio carriers on both the Individual and Small Group markets:

Most of the rate filing forms are heavily redacted, making it impossible to retreive the all-important enrollment numbers, but there's a few exceptions. Unfortunately, without have all (or at least the vast bulk) of this data, I can't get a weighted statewide average. Fortunately, Ohio's DOI already did that part for the Individual Market.

However, this raises another question. As you can see, only two of the ten carriers operating in Ohio next year have negative rate changes, and one of them is still higher than a 7% reduction (-5.3%). There's no way Ohio carriers can be looking at an average 7% reduction unless Molina Healthcare (-10.1%) has something like 99% of the total market, which I find difficult to believe:

I'll post an update if I find out what's going on here. Meanwhile, here's the unweighted average of the Small Group market: