Charles Gaba's blog

This year, thanks to their reinsurance program, ACA individual market premiums dropped by around 23.6% on average, from a whopping $1,040/month to "only" $795/month per enrollee.

HOWEVER, they would have dropped about 4.5 percentage points more if not for Trump cutting off Cost Sharing Reduction reimbursement payments, or roughly $560/year per enrollee. AK averaged around 16,000 effectuated ACA-compliant individual market enrollees per month in 2017, so that amounts to right around $8.9 million total. 6,930 enrollees qualify for CSR assistance this year, so that averages around $1,280 apiece in CSR help, which sounds about right to me.

Last fall I wrote a lot about how different states would be dealing with the tens of millions of dollars in losses they were facing after the Trump Administration decided to cut off Cost Sharing Reduction (CSR) reimbursement payments to them. As a quick reminder, there basically four (or five, depending on your POV) options available to each carrier and/or state insurance commissioner for dealign with CSR costs for 2018:

  • No Load: They could gamble that the CSR problem would be resolved and the payments would be made after all (i.e., they would price normally).
  • Broad Load: They could spread the CSR cost out evenly across all of their 2018 ACA policies, on exchange & off.
  • Silver Load: They could load the CSR costs onto all Silver plans only (both on & off exchange).
  • Silver Switcharoo: They could load CSR costs onto all on-exchange Silver plans only, while also creating "mirror" Silver plans off-exchange without any CSR load.
  • Mixed Load: Each insurance carrier could choose whichever of the other 4 strategies they wanted to and let the chips fall where they may. Not sure if this really counts as a "strategy", since it's more or less "all of the above".

Via the Colorado Division of Insurance:

DENVER (July 13, 2018) – The Colorado Division of Insurance, part of the Department of Regulatory Agencies (DORA), today released preliminary information for proposed health plans and premiums for 2019 for individuals and small groups. Colorado consumers can file formal comments on these plans through August 3.

2018 Companies Return for 2019
The same seven companies that offered on-exchange, individual plans are returning for 2019 - Anthem (as HMO Colorado), Bright Health, Cigna Health and Life, Denver Health Medical Plans, Friday Health Plans, Kaiser Foundation Health Plan of Colorado and Rocky Mountain HMO. And like in past years, this means that all counties in Colorado will have at least one on-exchange company selling individual health plans.

 

Over at the Brookings Institute, there's a big wonky forum this morning called (De)stabilizing the ACA’s individual market: A view from the states. The panelists include several of my own healthcare heroes: Louise Norris, Brad Wright, Lynn Blewett, Cynthia Cox, Sabrina Corlette and Matt Fiedler:

The Affordable Care Act (ACA), through the individual health insurance markets, provided coverage for millions of Americans who could not get health insurance coverage through their employer or public programs. However, recent actions taken by the federal government, including Congress’s repeal of the individual mandate penalty, have led to uncertainty about market conditions for 2019. Market stabilization is currently the most critical regulatory issue that public policy officials are facing under the private insurance component of the ACA.

Holy guacamole. I've noted repeatedly that unlike last fall, when average rate increases of 20-30% or more were commonplace for ACA individual market policies (due mainly to Trump cutting off CSR reimbursement payments), the preliminary rate requests for 2019 are actually averageing quite a bit lower than originally expected; of the 20 or so states I've crunched the numbers for so far, the weighted average for unsubsidized premium hikes is hovering around the 10% mark.

At first glance, it may sound like Democrats have been overplaying their hand when it comes to the "individual mandate repeal/short-term plan expansion is causing massive hikes!" attack. However, the rate increases from deliberate sabotage are happening...they're just being partly cancelled out by other factors, including:

If you've followed this site for awhile, you may recall that about a year ago, I called out the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid (CMS) for trying to pull a fast one regarding the 2017 Open Enrollment Period data.

The short version is that they tried to make it look as though only 10.3 million of the 12.2 million people who selected Qualified Health Plans (QHPs) from the ACA exchanges actually paid their first month's premium and were actually enrolled (i.e., "effectuated"), or around 84%. They then tried using this "fact" as evidence of how the ACA was failing, etc etc, because this was supposedly down from 2016 levels.

The difference, as I noted at the time, is that the 2016 effectuation numbers were as of March, while the 2017 effectuation numbers were as of February. This made a big difference, because around 500,000 people who enrolled during 2017 Open Enrollment couldn't have been effectuated for February...because about half a million people enrolled between Jan. 16th - Jan. 31st, which meant their policies weren't even scheduled to begin until March.

When the ACA exchanges first launched for the 2014 Open Enrollment Period, the law included three individual market stabilization programs. One of the programs was called reinsurance, and as far as I know it worked pretty well. Unfortunately, the federal ACA reinsurance program sunsetted after only three years, at the end of 2016, which is part of why rates spiked so much in 2017 (they shot up in most states in 2018 as well, but for very different reasons).

In response, several states (Alaska, Minnesota and Oregon) have enacted their own, state-level reinsurance programs, and several more are on the way (New Jersey, Maryland and Wisconsin). It's a fairly cut & dried way of keeping premiums down (or even lowering them in some cases) which requires no additional federal spending and much less state spending than you would think.

Here's an example of how it works:

I never thought I'd be quoting or linking to anything published by the ultra-conservative American Action Forum, and yet here we are:

How A Trade War With China Will Impact U.S. Health Care Costs
Jacqueline Varas, Tara O'Neill Hayes

...This report examines the overall effect of these tariffs specifically on U.S. health care. On the most recent lists are an array of medical equipment, including items such as MRI machines, X-ray machines, and surgical instruments. AAF identified 55 products on the tariff lists that can be classified as medical equipment.

Last week I noted that after slashing the marketing budget for HealthCare.Gov, by a whopping 90% (from $100 million to just $10 million) and cutting the Open Enrollment Period itself in half (from 3 months to just 6 weeks) and cutting the navigator/outreach budget by 41% (from $59 million down to $36 million), Trump's CMS Dept. was "considering" slashing the navigator budget for 2019 down further yet:

The Trump administration is considering cutting funding for ObamaCare outreach groups that help people enroll in coverage, sources say.

An initial proposal by the administration would have cut the funding for the groups, known as "navigators," from $36 million last year to $10 million this year. Sources say that proposal now could be walked back, and it is possible funding could remain the same as last year, but it is unclear where the final number will end up.

 

Last month I posted a lengthy, deep-in-the-weeds analysis of Michigan Gubernatorial candidate Abdul El-Sayed's state-based Single Payer healthcare proposal, dubbed "Michicare" (later changed to simply "MichCare").

Later I noted that his primary opponent, former State Senator and County Prosecutor Gretchen Whitmer, has far thinner responses posted on her website when it comes to healthcare policy. I also noted that there are some good reasons for this which likely have nothing to do with being "a tool of the insurance lobby", a "neoliberal sellout" bla bla bla and so forth.

However, for the record, yes, Ms. Whitmer does indeed support universal healthcare coverage, as shown in the Q&A video clip above from one of her town hall appearances (thanks to Mary Bernadette Minnick Weatherly for the clip and the OK to repost it).

Below is a verbatim transcript of the whole exchange:

Pages

Advertisement