Record Numbers of Washingtonians Sign Up for Health Care Coverage During 2021 Special Enrollment Period
LATEST DATA SHOWS IMPACT OF AMERICAN RESCUE PLAN ACT SAVINGS. NEARLY HALF OF ALL CUSTOMERS PAY LESS THAN $100 PER MONTH.
Washington Health Benefit Exchange (Exchange) announced on Tuesday more than 57,000 Washingtonians signed up for health care coverage between February 15 and August 15 on the state’s insurance marketplace, Washington Healthplanfinder. The Exchange opened a Special Enrollment Period in February in response to the COVID-19 Public Health Emergency. This allowed any individual in Washington the opportunity to apply for coverage or compare and upgrade their existing insurance.
Methodology reminders, including some important updates:
I go by FULLY vaccinated residents only (defined as 2 doses of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine or one dose of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine).
I base my percentages on the total population, as opposed to adults only or those over 11 years old.
For most states + DC I use the daily data from the Centers for Disease Control, but there are some where the CDC is either missing county-level data entirely or where the CDC data is less than 90% complete at the county level. Therefore:
For Colorado, Georgia, New Mexico and Texas, I'm using their COVID vaccine dashboards set up by the state health departments.
For California, I'm using the CDC data for most counties and the state health dept. dashboard data for the 8 small counties which the CDC isn't allowed to post data for.
NEW: I discovered that there's several additional states where the state health department dashboard data seems to be more comprehensive and accurate than the CDC data, including Illinois, Minnesota and North Carolina. I've switched to these states health department reports starting today.
The 5 major U.S. territories don't vote for President in the general election, preventing me from displaying them in the main graph, but I have them listed down the right side.
(sigh) Once again, the Kansas Insurance Dept. is supremely unhelpful when it comes to providing information about individual & small group market health insurance premium rate changes. Not only are the ACA plans not listed in the state's SERFF database or on the department's website, even the actuarial memos available at the federal Rate Review website are heavily redacted. As a result, I only have the actual enrollment numbers for a handful of carriers, preventing me from being able to calculate a weighted average (or to estimate the state's total ACA enrollment size, for that matter).
The unweighted average rate increase on Kansas' individual market is +8.3%, and it's +5.6% for the small group market, anyway.
The only way I was able to find the rate changes was by using the federal Rate Review website, and even then, the actuarial memos are all heavily redacted, making it impossible to know what the enrollment for each carrier si (with one exception: Wellmark Health Plan reported having 32,000 ACA-compliant individual market enrollees as of March 2021).
The Indiana Insurance Dept. doesn't seem to have issued a formal press release about this (or if they did, I can't find it), but they've quietly posted their preliminary 2022 health insurance premium rate change requests for both the individual and small group markets:
The overall average rate increase for 2022 Indiana individual marketplace plans is -1.65%.
Anthem, CareSource , US Health and Life, and Celtic (MHS/Ambetter) have filed to participate in the 2022 Indiana Individual Marketplace.
Anthem has also filed to offer an Off-Marketplace catastrophic plan in Benton, Jasper, Newton, Warren and White Counties.
The IDOI will finalize the review of the 2022 ACA compliant filings both on and off the federal Marketplace by September 22, 2021.
It looks like US Health & Life is new to the Indiana individual market, while UnitedHealthcare of KY is new to the small group market. Unfortunately I couldn't find the actual small group enrollment number for either Physicians Health Plan or Southeastern Indiana Health on the sm. group market, and the IU Health Plan number is an estimate.
For nearly a year, I posted a weekly analysis of the 100 U.S. counties (out of over 3,100 total) which had the highest cumulative rates of COVID-19 cases and deaths per capita. In addition, I also included a running graph which compared the ratio of COVID cases & deaths per capita between blue and red counties to track how this changed over time.
The results were extremely telling: In the early days of the pandemic back in March/April 2020, the blue counties were devastated for a variety of reasons, including heavy population density, the fact they were mostly located along the coasts (usually in cities with major international ports/airport hubs), and so forth. Democrats tend to live in heavily-populated urban areas, while Republicans are prone to live in more sparsely-populated rural areas, so this made sense.
For the first few months, both case and death rates were running as much as 4-5x higher in counties which voted solidly for Hillary Clinton in 2016/Joe Biden in 2020 than in those which voted for Trump in either 2016 or 2020.
The Department of Insurance receives preliminary health plan information for the following year from insurance carriers by June 1 and reviews the proposed plan documents and rates for compliance with Idaho and federal regulations.The Department of Insurance does not have the authority to set or establish insurance rates, but it does have the authority to deem rate increases submitted by insurance companies as reasonable or unreasonable. After the review and negotiation process, the carriers submit their final rate increase information.The public is invited to provide comments on the rate changes. Please send any comments to Idaho Department of Insurance.
It's important to note that the rate changes on the actual tables posted on the Insurance Dept. site are rounded off to the nearest percentage. It's also important to note that when I click through to the actual rate filings and plug in the more exact averages along with the number of members to calculate the weighted average, I got slightly different numbers:
Information About Proposed Rates for January 2022 Health Plan Offerings on DC Health Link
This page contains proposed health plan rate information for the District of Columbia’s health insurance marketplace, DC Health Link, for plan year 2022.
The District of Columbia Department of Insurance, Securities and Banking (DISB) received 184 proposed health insurance plan rates for review from Aetna, CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield, Kaiser Permanente and United Healthcare in advance of open enrollment for plan year 2022 on DC Health Link, the District of Columbia’s health insurance marketplace.
The four insurance companies filed proposed rates for individuals, families and small businesses for the 2022 plan year. Overall, 184 plans were filed, compared to 188 last year. The number of small group plans decreased from 163 to 157, and the number of individual plans increased from 25 to 27.
Health Insurance rate filings are available for the companies listed below. Additional companies will be listed as their filings are received. Any insurance filings already approved are available to the public through the NAIC’s System for Electronic Rate and Form Filing (SERFF) interface. There is no fee for using SERFF. Rate info can also be accessed at the Rate Review page at Healthcare.gov
Highmark DE is requesting an average plan level rate increase of 4.0% based on the projected enrollment mix by plan. The plan level rate changes will impact an estimated 26,568 current members. The rate change will vary by product ranging from a minimum of 1.7% to a maximum of 14.7%.
The Connecticut Insurance Department has posted the initial proposed health insurance rate filings for the 2022 individual and small group markets. There are 15 filings made by 11 health insurers for plans that currently cover approximately 222,700 people.
Anthem and ConnectiCare Benefits Inc. (CBI) have filed rates for both individual and small group plans that will be marketed through Access Health CT, the state-sponsored health insurance exchange. ConnectiCare Insurance Company, Inc. will begin participating on the exchange in the individual market effective 1/1/2022.
Cigna Health and Life Insurance Company began participating in the small group market 7/1/2021.
The 2022 rate proposals for the individual and small group market are on average higher than last year:
The proposed average individual rate request is an 8.6 percent increase, compared to 6.3 percent in 2021 and ranges from 5.1 percent to 12.3 percent.
