Charles Gaba's blog

Sunday, July 19th, 2020:

Wallace: "But you've been in office 3 1/2 years, you don't have a plan..."

Trump: "But we haven't had...uh...excuse me...you heard me yesterday. We're signing a healthcare plan...within two weeks. A full and complete healthcare plan that the Supreme Court decision on DACA gave me the right to do. So we're gonna solve...we're gonna sign an immigration plan, a healthcare plan, and various other plans....and nobody will have done what I'm doing in the next four weeks.

It's been thirteen days.

The Colorado Dept. of Insurance has released the state's preliminary rate filings for 2021 individual & small group market policies yesterday.

Overall, it looks like Colorado carriers are asking for a weighted average rate increase of 2.2% on the individual market and 5.7% on the small group market. There's some important tables breaking out exactly which carriers are offering their policies in which counties, and they've even broken out the average rate hikes by rating area, which is unusual to see but takes on special significance in Colorado due to thier unusual Section 1332 reinsurance waiver program, which is more robust in some parts of the state than others (I believe most reinsurance programs are pretty much an across-the-board sort of thing, though I could be wrong about that).

Vanity Fair

Back in March, I launched my own COVID-19 case/fatality tracking spreadsheet project which mostly duplicates any number of existing sites, but with a couple of additional twists:

  • I've included the estimated total population of every U.S state/territory via Wikipedia (as of July 2019) which allows me to add new columns listing both the confirmed COVID-19 cases and deaths per capita. This gives a much clearer picture of how relatively ugly things have gotten in each state/territory to date.
  • I've added columns to rank the daily percent increase in both confirmed cases and deaths for each state/territory (on the right side), which is important for tracking the rate of the virus' spread.
  • I've added the Presidential partisan lean of each state as well as which party holds the governor's seat. This may seem incredibly inappropriate (and it is), but it's sadly necessary because Donald Trump has apparently decided to only grant his favor and any substantial assistance to states which a) voted for him and b) whose governors kiss his ass enough.

I've taken some amount of criticism from people who got the vapors and claimed that I was "politicizing" the pandemic, which is laughable in the Trump era, where everything has been politicized by the Trump Administration.

via the Rhode Island Insurance Dept:

2021 Requested Commercial Health Insurance Rates Have Been Submitted to OHIC for Review

CRANSTON, R.I. (July 21st, 2020) – The Office of Health Insurance Commissioner (OHIC) today released the individual, small, and large group market premium rates requested by Rhode Island’s insurers. The requests were filed as part of OHIC’s 2020 rate review and approval process (for rates effective in 2021). Tables 1 – 3, below, summarize the insurers’ requests for 2021, and provide the requested and approved rate changes for the previous two years. Two insurers, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Rhode Island (BCBSRI) and Neighborhood Health Plan of Rhode Island (NHPRI) filed plans to be sold on the individual market for persons who do not receive insurance through their employer. In addition to BCBSRI and NHPRI, UnitedHealthcare and Tufts Health Plan filed small group market plans. Five insurers (BCBSRI, UnitedHealthcare, Tufts Health Plan, Aetna, and Cigna) filed large group rates.

I'm glad to see MNsure getting the word out about this issue but it's disturbing that they felt a need to do so...

CONSUMER ALERT: How to find MNsure online and make sure you're buying comprehensive coverage

ST. PAUL, Minn.—Searching for MNsure on the internet can yield misleading results. If you search for MNsure, you may see ads and websites that appear to be the official MNsure website but are not. Some of these sites collect your contact information and either bombard you with phone calls or try to sell you sub-standard health insurance. Here’s how to be sure you’re working with MNsure and purchasing comprehensive health care coverage:

Those eligible for the urgent need program must:

Check the website URL: make sure you’re clicking on MNsure.org when using a search engine or simply type MNsure.org into your address bar.

This actually came out last week but I didn't have a chance to do a write-up on it until now:

July 23, 2020 - Early 2020 Effectuated Enrollment Snapshot

This report provides effectuated enrollment, premium, and advance payments of the premium tax credit (APTC) data for the Federally-facilitated and State-based Exchanges (“the Exchanges”) for February 2020 and for the 2019 plan year.

February 2020 Effectuated Enrollment Snapshot Key Findings

The data below comes from the GitHub data repositories of Johns Hopkins University, execpt for Rhode Island, Utah and Wyoming, which come from the GitHub data of the New York Times due to the JHU data being incomplete for these three states. Some data comes directly from state health department websites.

Here's the top 100 counties ranked by per capita COVID-19 cases as of Saturday, July 25th (click image for high-res version):

via the Connecticut Insurance Dept:

The Connecticut Insurance Department has posted the initial proposed health insurance rate filings for the 2021 individual and small group markets. There are 14 filings made by 10 health insurers for plans that currently cover about 214,600 people.

Important: As noted below, the 214,600 figure is Connecticut's individual & small group market combined.

Two carriers – 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.

The 2021 rate proposals for the individual and small group market are on average slightly lower than last year:

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