So, it's over, right? Well...not quite. The 2019 ACA Open Enrollment Period officially ended last night...but only in 43 states. In the remaining seven (+DC), Open Enrollment hasn't ended yet. 2019 ACA Open Enrollment is still ongoing for nearly 10% of the population!
In Massachusetts, open enrollment runs through Jan. 23rd, 2019 for coverage starting February 1st
In the District of Columbia and New York, open enrollment runs through Jan. 31st for coverage starting March 1st
This just in from the Florida Office of Insurance Regulation...
OIR Announces 2019 PPACA Individual Market Health Insurance Plan Rates
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. – The Florida Office of Insurance Regulation (OIR) announced today that premiums for Florida individual major medical plans in compliance with the federal Patient Protection & Affordable Care Act (PPACA) will increase an average of 5.2 percent beginning January 1, 2019. Per federal guidelines, a total of nine health insurance companies submitted rate filings for OIR’s review in June with final rate determinations due by August 22, 2018.
Following OIR’s rate filing review, the average approved rate changes on the Exchange range from a low of -1.5 percent to a high of 9.8 percent. This information can be located in the Individual PPACA Market Monthly Premiums for Plan Year 2019 document available here.
Florida is the 3rd largest state in the country, but has nearly the same number of ACA-compliant individual health insurance policy enrollees as California (around 2.0 million people if you subtract out grandfathered and transitional enrollees, vs. California's 2.1 million) even though Florida's total population is only 53% of California's (about 20.9 million vs. 39.5 million). Put another way, nearly 13% of Florida's non-elderly population is enrolled in the individual market, which is about twice as high as the natoinal average.
Add to this the fact that Florida is also the largest swing state politically, and people will be watching Florida's ACA exchange/premium situation very closely this fall.
Scott started what was first Columbia in 1987, purchasing two El Paso, Texas, hospitals. Over the next decade he would add hundreds of hospitals, surgery centers and home health locations. In 1994, Scott’s Columbia purchased Tennessee-headquartered HCA and its 100 hospitals, and merged the companies.
Now that it appears that the full list of states and counties eligible for hurricane (or windstorm, in the case of Maine) Special Enrollment Periods (SEP) has settled down, Huffington Post reporter Jonathan Cohn asked an interesting question:
How if at all do you allow for the extensions in FL, TX, etc.? Or, to put another way, how many post-Dec 15 signups through https://t.co/bhGNSognZK do you expect?
The closest parallel to this particular situation I can think of was the #ACATaxTime SEP back in spring 2015. In that case, it was the first year that the ACA's (defunct as of this morning) Individual Mandate was being enforced, and a lot of people either never got the message about being required to #GetCovered or at least pretended that they didn't.
CMS Announces Special Enrollment Periods for Americans Impacted by Recent Hurricanes Agency provides special open enrollment periods for 2017 Medicare and Exchange coverage
As a result of Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) will make available special enrollment periods for all Medicare beneficiaries and certain individuals seeking health plans offered through the Federal Health Insurance Exchange. This important step gives these individuals and families who have been impacted by the hurricanes the opportunity to change their Medicare health and prescription drug plans and gain access to health coverage on the Exchange immediately if eligible for a special enrollment period.
Back in August it looked as though Florida carriers were looking at either 15.5% unsubsidized rate increases on the individual market if CSR reimbursement payments were guaranteed next year, or around 35.5% if they weren't. Well, the official rates have been released by the Florida Dept. of Insurance, and it's even uglier than that for unsubsidized enrollees:
Office Announces Submission of Proposed Rates for 2018 Federal PPACA Health Insurance Plans
We're heading into the home stretch now, with the only remaining "supersize" state, FLORIDA. FL has the largest exchange-based individual market enrollment, and the 2nd largest total individual market enrollment of any state in the country, surpassing California for a variety of local economic/demographic reasons. The Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that FL carriers would have to add about 25% to their Silver plan premiums in order to make up for CSR reimbursements if Trump pulls the plug and/or Congress doesn't formally appropriate them. Since 80% of FL exchange enrollees are on Silver plans, that translates to roughly a 20% additional "Trump Tax" for the CSR factor alone. Note that while none of the carriers mention the CSR issue (meaning they all assume the payments will be made), Molina does call out the individual mandate enforcement issues as being part of their 37.5% rate increase request. Unfortunately, they don't put a hard number on this.
In additon to color-coding their data by the political party of each District's Representative, I'm also adding my own spin on the data: Estimates of how many people currently enrolled in the individual market suffer from "pre-existing conditions" which would likely mean them either being denied coverage altogether if the ACA's Guaranteed Issue, Essential Health Benefits and Community Rating provisions were to be stripped (Alternately, these people would charged massively higher rates to the point of likely not being able to afford the policy).
...the assumption is that as long as insurance carriers either a) know they'll make a profit in a given market or b) think they'll make a profit at some point in the near future, they'll participate in that market, right?
However, that's not necessarily the case. As we saw last year in the case of Aetna, profitability itself doesn't necessarily guarantee participation. Aetna pulled out of 11 states, and while they were losing money on the indy market in most of them, there were at least 2 states (Pennsylvania and Florida) where they were making a profit, yet bailed anyway. In fact, in Florida, the only reason they were making a profit in the indy market was because of their exchange business (they were losing money off-exchange).
