Between updating the "Who could lose coverage" graphics, prepping for my town hall thing last night and updating the 2018 Rate Hike project, I've gotten way behind on my "Who's saying 'screw rate hikes, I'm just gonna bail completely next year' updates. Let's take care of that now, OK? The first three updates are courtesy of Louise Norris writing for healthinsurance.org; the fourth is vai Kimberly Leonard for the Washington Examiner:
Insurers in Idaho had to submit forms for 2018 plans by May 15, but they have until June 2 to file rates. Mountain Health CO-OP, SelectHealth, PacificSource and Blue Cross of Idaho all filed forms to continue to offer Your Health Idaho plans in 2018.
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I crunched the numbers for Texas, it's actually easier to figure out how many people would lose coverage if the ACA is repealed in non-expansion states because you can't rip away healthcare coverage from someone who you never provided it to in the first place.
Last week I noted that with 41 states accounted for and the 2017 Open Enrollment Period quickly bearing down on everyone, it was time to pull the plug on my 2017 Average Rate Hike project and move on. I had come up with an overall national weighted unsubsidized average rate increase of around 25% for ACA-compliant individual market plans.
However, I also noted that I'd make sure to fill in the approved rates for the remaining 10 states as they came in, for completeness sake...and today, thanks to the HHS Dept. cutting the ribbon on 2017 Window Shopping at HealthCare.Gov, I've also been able to fill in the blanks for five of the remaining states all in one shot (the other five remain elusive).
Lots of stuff happening fast & furious these days as #OE4 approaches. Instead of individual posts, I'm gonna cram 7 state updates into a single one...and am also cheating a bit by cribbing off of excellent work by Louise Norris over at healthinsurance.org (which is fair, since she also gets some of her data from me as well):
ALABAMA: Here's what my requested rate hike table looked like for Alabama on August 1st:
OK, there's something very odd going on with Missouri's 2017 rate filings for the individual market. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, Missouri's entire individual market was around 344,000 people in 2014. While it's likely increased by around 25% since then, that would still only bring it up to around 430,000 people including both grandfathered and transitional enrollees, which sounds about right to me (290,000 enrolled via the ACA exchange, which would leave around 140,000 off-exchange).
And yet, when I plug in the official rate filings for Missouri's individual market for 2017, here's what it looks like:
Coalition cheers Health Insurance Rate Review bill passage
The House followed the Senate’s unanimous approval of SB 865, sponsored by Sen. David Sater, with a 140-6 vote, moving the “Health Insurance Rate Review” bill to the Governor’s desk on Tuesday.
In addition to rate review, the bill will modify provisions regarding licenses issued by the Board of Pharmacy and covered prescription benefits, delineates procedures for PBMs with regards to MAC lists, and requires health carriers to offer medication synchronization services.
The advancement was cheered by Missouri Health Care for All (MHCFA), who believe the bill will bring more transparency to insurance premiums.
When UnitedHealthcare announced last month that they were making good on their threat last fall to pull out of the individual market in over two dozen states next year, it caused shockwaves across the health insurance industry. It is an important development, as around 800,000 people will be impacted.
When Humana announced last week that they plan on pulling out of the individual market in at least 5 states next year, it was interesting and a bit of a bummer, but not nearly as earthshattering, because only about 25,000 people will have to shop around and find a new carrier.
Today, it is my duty to announce that Celtic insurance has also decided to pull out of the entire individual insurance market (both on and off-exchange) across at least 6 states, including:
When I was crunching the numbers to come up with my rough estimate of the weighted average rate increase requests for Florida yesterday, I had a revelation: While Healthcare.Gov's Rate Review database, frustratingly, only includes rate requests higher than 10% (thus ignoring dozens of requests of under 10%, or even rate reductions in some cases), it doesstill at least provide guidance as to what the maximum average could possibly be.
For instance, let's say that there's a state with 4 insurance carriers, each of which has exactly 10,000 enrollees. Two of them are asking for a 20% and 15% increase respectively. Since those are both above 10%, they'll both show up on the Rate Review site:
Part of the key to the successful enrollment of over 8 million* people last year and around 12 million* this year in the various ACA exchange policies has been the army of so-called "navigators" or "assisters" who, along with private health insurance brokers, helped educate millions of people about how the exchanges work, what their best options were and how to go through the procedure.
Unfortunately, some states (those run by administrations of a certain crimson hue, shall we say) decided, in their effort to obstruct Obamacare at every possible opportunity, to be utter jackasses by ginning up absurd regulations/restrictions about who "qualified" to be an ACA navigator.
I still don't know why they didn't roll it out one state per day; if they'd gone alphabetically, they would have had a solid week to work the kinks out with a (relatively) low volume before hitting a big state:
Alabama, Alaska, Arizona and Arkansas are all relatively low-population.
California, Colorado, Connecticut and Delaware* are all state-run exchanges.
That means they wouldn't have hit Florida on the federal site until tomorrow.
I know that the system still would have had serious software issues, but at least they wouldn't have to deal with the massive overload of traffic at the same time that they were trying to fix the issues.
*(Obviously I was mistaken at the time about Delaware running their own exchange, but it's still a low-population state so my point was still valid...and of course the District of Columbia does run their own exchange).
Well, obviously it was too late for that at the time, and they've since scrambled to get their act together on the individual exchange side.
