The most recent ACA/healthcare news out of Illinois was the ugly announcement that Land of Lincoln Health is the latest ACA-created Co-Op to go belly-up, leaving 49,000 people (39,000 on individual plans and 10,000 in the small group market) having to scramble to find new coverage in the middle of the year. This was on top of recent news that UnitedHealthcare is pulling out of dozens of states including Illinois (Humana is also dropping out of a bunch of states, but I don't think Illinois is among them).
Well, nature (and the market) abhors a vacuum, so guess what?
One of the nation's largest health insurance companies plans to enter the Obamacare marketplace in the Chicago area for the first time, bringing new competition as other insurers exit or go out of business.
Likely stupid question here, but if they were doing this bad financially that they couldn't even make it though all of 2016, then how come when requesting their 2016 rates last year they (apparently) asked for less than a 10% bump?
Land of Lincoln coverage will end Oct. 1 for individual enrollees
Land of Lincoln Health's insurance coverage for its individual enrollees will end Oct. 1, according to the Illinois Department of Insurance.
The agency posted the news on Land of Lincoln's website. A green banner now greets visitors to the website with the headline, "Important notice to all members" with a link taking them to information about the Chicago-based insurer's impending shutdown. The notice comes a week after the agency moved to seize control of the financially troubled Chicago-based insurer.
Earlier this week I noted that one of the remaining co-ops, HealthyCT of Connecticut, is the latest to go belly-up...due in large part to a different program, "Risk Adjustment". The irony in both cases is that both programs were supposed to be designed specifically to help ensure that "little guy startups" such as the co-ops would be protected from dissolution during the unstable first few years of the ACA exchanges. Instead, developments in both programs have served to help destroy them.
As I noted the other day, the Risk Adjustment program seems to be backfiring:
Land of Lincoln Mutual Health Insurance Co. plans to look for outside investors to boost its financial resources after federal regulators indicated they would loosen funding restrictions on consumer operated and oriented plans.
I admit that given the carnage of the past couple of weeks, I'm almost afraid to post this entry...but I had to write something positive about the CO-OP situation.
With the ACA-created CO-OPs seemingly dropping like flies due to the #RiskCorridorMassacre, I thought this would be a good time to flip things around and look at which CO-OPs are doing well (or at least not badly).
This isn't much, but it'll do for now:
Wisconsin's insurance department says it has no intention of shutting down its #ACA co-op, which appears it will remain solvent next year.
IMPORTANT:See this detailed explanation of how I've come up with the following estimated maximum requested weighted average rate increases for Illinois
As explained in the first link above, I've still been able to piece together rough estimates of the maximum possible and most likely approved average rate increase for the Illinois individual market:
Again, the full explanation is included in the Missouri estimate linked at the top of this entry, but to the best of my knowledge, it looks like the companies with rate increases higher than 10% come in at a weighted 32.7% increase, but only make up about 57% of the total ACA-compliant individual market, with several other companies with approved increases of less than 10% (decreases in some cases) making up the other 43%.
A hospital group in cash-strapped Illinois says the state might be able to set up a health insurance exchange at a lower cost by "leasing" the federal government's technology, an option that could appeal to as many as 34 states where subsides could be jeopardized by an unfavorable U.S. Supreme Court decision.
OK, this one is a bit vague, but for the moment I'll take it. "Land of Lincoln Health" is an insurance CO-OP which operates, as you'd imagine from the name, in Illinois. I'm fairly certain that's the only state they operate in, so this number should be restricted to IL:
Land of Lincoln has enrolled “several hundred people” since open enrollment began this past Saturday, and the plan is already receiving payments from consumers, said Dorgan, who is in charge of finding and renewing members. About 6,000 people visited Land of Lincoln's website over the weekend with no apparent technology issues—an auspicious start for a plan that hopes to have 50,000 covered lives for 2015.
For the moment I'll assume "several hundred" means "300 - 400" and will go with 350 until better data comes out.
This is excellent news for another reason as well: Land of Lincoln only scored about 2,500 enrollees for 2014 open enrollment, so they're at something like 14% of their entire 2014 number in just 2 days.
At the end of August, Illinois' Medicaid expansion program was up to around 452,000 people (including 93,000 transferred over from the existing CountyCare program). As of the end of September, that total was up another 16,000:
The video also coincides with the release Tuesday of new data by Quinn’s administration that showed 468,000 people enrolled in the expanded Medicaid program since last year, more than double original forecasts.
Of course, the larger point of the article in question is that if Democratic Illinois Gov. Quinn's Republican opponent had been calling the shots, he would have told all 468,000 of his fellow Illinoisians (?) to go pound sand:
SPRINGFIELD — Newly surfaced video of Republican Bruce Rauner obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times shows him telling conservative activists in Lake County last year that, as governor, he would have blocked Gov. Pat Quinn’s 2013 expansion of Medicaid.
