2017 Rate Request Early Look: Wisconsin

As I noted Monday morning, I believe that August 1st was the deadline for every state to submit their 2017 rate filings, meaning that the 14 states missing from my Requested Rate Hike Project are finally available to be plugged into the spreadsheet. I'll also be going back through the other states I've been tracking since as early as April to see which ones require updates due to carriers dropping out, joining in or resubmitting their rate requests.

Wisconsin's total individual market was around 260,000 people in 2014 and is likely up to around 300,000 today (not including grandfathered/transitional enrollees), with about 224,000 enrolled on ACA exchange policies as of March 2016, plus an unknown number off-exchange. That means that the table below is likely missing around 1/3 of the total ACA-compliant market.

Around 6,600 of these can be found enrolled via Humana, which is dropping out of the Wisconsin market next year; an unknown number appear to be enrolled in UnitedHealthcare plans (the fact that United isn't listed below seems to confirm that WI is among the dozens of states they're also pulling out of). The rest are presumably enrolled in any of the 5 carriers below (Group Health, Managed Health, Network Health Plan, WI Physicians Svc. and WPS). Unfortunately, the enrollment figures for all of these carriers are redacted from public view.

Fortunately, if you eyeball their average rate hikes, it looks to me as though they should mostly cancel each other out: 5.4%, 9.1% and 10.5% vs. 23.7%, 32.4% and 36.4%...if you assume a straight average (which obviously is unlikely, but what else can I do here?), they average out to right around the same 20.0% that the known carriers average.