Florida: *Preliminary* avg. 2020 #ACA exchange premiums: 1.2% increase

I've now analyzed the preliminary average (weighted or, in a few unfortunate cases, unweighted) premium change requests for over 3 dozen states. Of the dozen or so left, the largest states unanalyzed are Georgia, Texas...and Florida.

Florida may be the third largest state, but it has the largest ACA Individual health insurance market. 18% more Floridians enrolled in ACA exchange policies this year than California, in spite of FL's total population being only 54% as large.

Two years ago I noted that for whatever reasons (demographics? state economy?), Florida's Individual market is twice as large as the rest of the country on a per capita basis. Today I found out that FL's indy market is actually larger than their large group market:

Those numbers are as of December 2017, so I'm sure they've moved around a bit since then, but the bottom line is that Florida's total individual market (including the off-exchange market) is huge...second only to California's.

Here's where it gets more interesting: California's total Indy market is 2.2 million people, but only 1.4 million are on-exchange; the other 800K are off-exchange. Florida, by contrast, has a total Indy market of perhaps 1.65 million. Due to non-payments and monthly churn, only about 80% of Indy market enrollees are actually effectuated on average per month, which means the on-exchange market is perhaps 1.43 million people. That means in Florida, around 86% of their entire Indy market is on-exchange.

In any event, the Florida Office of Insurance Regulation has posted a partial summary of the requested 2020 rate changes. Unfortunately, they don't provide the breakout by carrier, nor the actual enrollment data...but they do include the statewide weighted average: A 1.2% rate increase. For the small group market (which, again, is less than 1/3 the size of the Indy market), it's 6.4% on average.

I was able to get the individual carrier hikes for four of the 10 Indy carriers and 10 of the 14 small group carriers from RateReview.HealthCare.Gov, but the other 10 are missing as of this writing for some reason.