Tomorrow afternoon, CBO expects to release a report, which is being prepared with the staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation, about the effects of terminating payments for cost-sharing reductions. The analysis will include effects on the federal budget, health insurance coverage, market stability, and premiums.
Unfortunately, I'm not going to be in a position to write anything up about the CBO report, as I'm going on a long-overdue mini-vacation to visit Mackinac Island for a few days. I'm sure I'll be chiming in via Twitter when possible, but my wife will kill me if I try to write a full blog post, so that'll be about it.
Therefore, here's my thoughts about what the CBO is likely to conclude:
The effect on the budget will depend heavily on how many carriers decide to (or are allowed to) go the "Silver Switcharoo" route with their revised/final rate filings:
As I explained a couple of weeks ago, even if CSR payments aren't made next year, there are five different paths a given insurance carrier can take for 2018:
1. Drop out of the on-exchange market so you're not at risk of having any CSR enrollees; stick around the off-exchange market.
2. Drop out of the entire individual market, both on and off exchange.
3. Preemptively cover your anticipated 2018 CSR losses by spreading them out across all plans on and off exchange.
4. Preemptively cover your anticipated 2018 CSR losses by loading them onto Silver plans only both on and off exchange.
5. Preemptively cover your anticipated 2018 CSR losses by loading them onto on-exchange Silver plans only.
Some carriers, tragically, have already thrown their hands up in the air and decided to wash their hands of the whole thing by choosing either #1 or 2 above. This includes Humana, Aetna, Wellmark and, most recently, Anthem, which is drastically scaling back their 2018 individual market participation levels.
The first one to fall was CoOportunity, which operated in Iowa and Nebraska. Their enrollments were halted in the middle of the 2nd Open Enrollment period, and they were liquidated before OE2 even finished.
As noted in the Virginia and Maryland updates, I've started going through the earlier state rate filings and revising them to include:
Updated/revised carrier rate filings;
Additional market withdrawls and/or expansions;
Corrections to CSR factor impact, etc.
The original versions of each state writeup includes screen shots of the actual filing documents and explainers behind specific requests; I don't have time for that with most of the updates, so I'm bundling several states together. Here's Connecticut, Oregon and Vermont's revisions:
As noted the other day, now that I've compiled the initial 2018 rate filing requests for 46 states + DC (the remaining 4 states aren't public yet), it's time to go back to the earlier states I analyzed and see whether there's been any updates/corrections to my original estimates. I started running the numbers back in early May, and a lot has changed since then, with carriers dropping out of the exchanges, expanding to fill the gaps or simply refiling with revised pricing requests.
Date: August 10, 2017
Title: Information on Risk Adjustment Methodology and Rate Filing Deadlines
Question: What changes will be made to the risk adjustment methodology to account for recent rating practices that assume issuers of silver-level QHPs facing increased liability for enrollees in cost-sharing reduction plan variations?
For the past two years, Virginia has been the first state in the nation to post their initial rate filings for the following year. I originally compiled their individual market 2018 change requests back in early May, and came up with the following at the time:
UnitedHealthcare had previously announced they were dropping out of Virginia, but I didn't have an enrollee number for them, and Aetna had also just announced their withdrawl from the state. I hadn't yet finalized my "CSR/Mandate Penalty" factor layout yet; at the time I assumed the 30.6% weighted average requested assumed full CSR/mandate sabotage and reduced that number by 17 points based on the Kaiser Family Foundation's "19% national average CSR rate hike" estimate analysis, which estimated the CSR impact at 17 points for Virginia.
I've completed this process for 46 states + DC. I've confirmed (well, really, Louise Norris confirmed for me) that the filing data for the four missing states--Kansas, Missouri, Nevada and Utah--won't be made available publicly for another couple of weeks, which is irritating...but those four states combined only make up about 5% of the total population anyway; unless their average rate increase requests are significantly higher (or lower) than the average of the rest of the states, they aren't gonna move the needle up or down by more than a tenth of a point or so.
Like Wisconsin and Michigan, Ohio has a high number of carriers statewide...although the per-county competition is still lacking in some areas. Even so, their rate hike requests are still pretty high even with CSR payments being made...and dramatically higher if they aren't.
One interesting tidbit: Check out the CareSource filing letter (first one below the table). They don't mention CSRs or mandate enforcement...but they do specify that a full 5 points of their 23.9% increase request is tied to prescription drug inflation (see Shkreli, Martin)...and even more noteworthy, they say that another 5 points is due specifically to "a number of previously [Medicaid-] qualified individuals" being kicked over to the private exchange,
I had already posted a partial look at the New Jersey rate hike situation a couple of weeks ago with a video in which Topher Spiro of the Center for American Progress interviewed NJ Congressman Frank Pallone about the situation. Since his comments weren't official and only referred to Horizon Blue Cross, I didn't make it an official part of the Rate Hike spreadsheet, but now I've managed to plug in the remaining carriers and here's how it looks. As expected, with Horizon holding a commanding 70% market share, the statewide average is around 8.5% if CSR payments are made and the mandate is enforced versus 21.6% if CSR payments aren't made and the mandate isn't enforced.
Also, check out Horizon's cover letter explaining the rate hike...they're not screwing around with who to pin the blame on.
