Arizona: *Final* avg. unsubsidized 2025 #ACA rate changes: +4.2% (updated)

Originally posted 8/13/24

The good news is that the federal Rate Review database has now posted the preliminary avg. 2025 rate filings for the individual and small group markets for every state. This makes it very easy to plug in the average requested rate changes in 2025 for every carrier participating in both markets.

The bad news is that most of the underlying filing forms are heavily redacted, meaning I can't use the RR database to acquire the other critical data I need in order to run a proper weighted average: The number of people actually enrolled in the policies for each carrier.

This means that in cases where this data isn't available elsewhere (either the state's insurance department website, the SERFF database or otherwise), I'm limited to running an unweighted average. This can make a huge difference...if one carrier is requesting a 10% increase and the other is keeping prices flat, that's a 5.0% unweighted average rate hike...but if the first carrier has 99,000 enrollees and the second only has 1,000, that means the weighted average is actually 9.9%.

With that in mind, here's the preliminary filings for Arizona carriers: An unweighted average 2.1% increase on the individual market (ranging from -6.1% +10.4%), and an unweighted average 6.8% increase on the small group market (ranging from -0.3% to +13.8%).

The biggest news on the Arizona ACA market for 2025 is that Medica Community Health Plan appears to be leaving the individual market while WMI Mutual seems to be dropping out of the small group market.

Update 9/19/24: According to Louise Norris, Medica isn't leaving AZ, but their 2025 filing simply "isn't available" yet for some reason.

Update 9/19/24: I've corrected the avg. unsubsidized 2024 premium as well as adding the effectuated exchange-based enrollment as of February 2024.

While I still don't know what Arizona's actual total individual market enrollment is, if you assume 85% of it is on exchange that would make it roughly 399,000, with 76% being subsidized.

UPDATE 10/15/24: OK, it looks like Medica is leaving the AZ market after all. Meanwhile, the Arizona Insurance Dept. has published the approved rate filings for 2025, and the updated SERFF filings include the effectuated enrollment as of last spring for every carrier.

With that, the final/approved weighted average increase statewide is 4.2% on the individual market and 7.9% for small group enrollees.

It also looks like an impressive 97% of all Arizona individual market enrollees are now on-exchange, although Medica's enrollees are unknown.