As the final deadline for final 2018 individual market rates to be locked in and the contracts signed, more states are coming into focus, and the pattern continues to be remarkably consistent.
In Mississippi, I originally pegged the requested rate hikes across the two individual market carriers (technically three, but "Freedom Life" is a phantom carrier with only 2 alleged enrollees) at 16.1% if CSR payments are made and 39.6% if they aren't. It turns out I was off by a bit, however, because I didn't realize that BCBS of Mississippi was only selling policies off-exchange next year. That means the CSR issue won't impact them either way, since none of their enrollees would receive the assistance anyway.
There's only two carriers participating in Mississippi's individual market next year (plus Freedom Life, which once again is just a shell company here). They're asking for 16.1% average rate hikes, and since there's no mention in any of the filings about CSR payments not being made or the mandate not being enforced, I'm assuming that increase doesn't account for those factors.
As I noted when I crunched the numbers for Texas, it's actually easier to figure out how many people would lose coverage if the ACA is repealed in non-expansion states because you can't rip away healthcare coverage from someone who you never provided it to in the first place.
Mississippi remains one of only two states which still don't have their 2017 Rate Filings posted over at HC.gov's Rate Review database. In addition, while Mississippi does use the SERFF system for other types of insurance, major medical doesn't appear to be among them. Finally, while the MS Dept. of Insurance does include a special website specifically designed for searching/comparing rate changes for health insurance policies...it doesn't appear to have been updated in awhile (the only recently listings are for obscure carriers which seem to be mostly offering short-term plans and other "mini-med" types of policies, not full ACA-compliant plans.
UPDATE: This story has, thankfully, gone quite viral since I originally posted it yesterday morning. One important clarification: I estimated the monthly cost for treatment at around $5,200. According to Ms. Nichols in this local story about the situation in the Clarion-Ledger, the cost for her daughter’s treatment/medication is around $2,000; the balance appears to be for her husband, who also has diabetes. This actually makes the family more sympathetic, because she’s only asking for state assistance for her daughter’s portion of the bill.
In addition, according to the updated local story, the message appears to have gotten through to Rep. Guice (at least to the point that he's issued an apology, anyway):
Guice, who told The Clarion-Ledger Tuesday morning "I don't do interviews" and declined to comment, issued an apology Tuesday night.
For most of the states I'm analyzing, I have hard enrollment numbers for the insurance carriers requesting rate hikes over 10%; it's the remaining companies (the ones seeking hikes of less than 10%) which are generally the big unknowns.
In Mississippi's case, this is flipped around: There appear to only be 4 companies offering individual policies in the entire state, and while I'm missing the enrollment number for the biggest one (BCBSMS), I can calculate a pretty close estimate due to a unique factor: Neither of the two asking for >10% hikes are offering exchange-based policies:
Assuming subsidies remain in place, none of the individual plans available in Mississippi’s exchange have requested double digit rate increases for 2016. The only exchange plan requesting a rate increase of ten percent or more is a small group plan from United HealthCare. Rate increases of at least ten percent are published on Healthcare.gov’s rate review tool, and the only individual market Mississippi plans on the list are off-exchange.
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.
Why has the law been such a flop in a state that had so much to gain from it? When I traveled across Mississippi this summer, from Delta towns to the Tennessee border to the Piney Woods to the Gulf Coast, what I found was a series of cascading problems: bumbling errors and misinformation; ignorance and disorganization; a haunting racial divide; and, above all, the unyielding ideological imperative of conservative politics. This, I found, was a story about the Tea Party and its influence over a state Republican Party in transition, where a public feud between Governor Phil Bryant and the elected insurance commissioner forced the state to shut down its own insurance marketplace, even as the Obama administration in Washington refused to step into the fray. By the time the federal government offered the required coverage on its balky HealthCare.gov website, 70 percent of Mississippians confessed they knew almost nothing about it. “We would talk to people who say, ‘I don’t want anything about Obamacare. I want the Affordable Care Act,’” remembered Tineciaa Harris, one of the so-called navigators trained to help Mississippians sign up for health care. “And we’d have to explain to them that it’s the same thing.”
This is the third 2015 rate change update today; I had already reported on the 25% drop on one of the companies operating on Mississippi's exchange a few weeks ago, but this makes it official, and also reveals that the 2nd provider (there's only 2 on MS's exchange) is only requesting to raise their rates by 6.5%:
This Just In: From the Paul Gallo Show, the Mississippi Insurance Dept. and Cover Mississippi: One of the 2 insurance companies operating on the ACA exchange in Mississippi plans on cutting their rates by a whopping 25%!
The caveat is that we still don't know what the other company's rate plans are, nor do I know what that 25% rate cut was in the first place, but this is still excellent news:
