Charles Gaba's blog

h/t to Rebecca Stob for the heads up:

OLYMPIA, Wash. - Eleven health insurers filed 71 health plans for Washington state’s 2018 individual and family health insurance market, with an average proposed rate increase of 22.3 percent. No health insurer filed plans in two counties – Klickitat and Grays Harbor.

Insurance Commissioner Mike Kreidler has been reaching out to insurers since they filed their plans on June 7 to see if one or more will reconsider offering plans in the bare counties.

“I’m very concerned by the proposed changes we’re seeing,” Kreidler said. “I know these numbers will be extremely upsetting to people who buy their own health insurance. They’re upsetting to me. We’re going to spend the next several months reviewing every assumption insurers have made to make sure their proposed increases are justified.

OK, this was a bit unexpected.

Last week I analyzed the monthly enrollment effectuation numbers through all 4 years of ACA Open Enrollment (2013 - 2017), to help visualize how the enrollment numbers flow throughout the year (and to also show how misleading the Trump CMS "attrition" report from last week was).

Then, on Thursday, I wrote about a CMS powerpoint presentation from last year which provided a Holy Grail of sorts for me: Not only did it provide the monthly effectuation numbers for 2015, it broke them out by starting and ending month. That is, it divided the numbers into how many enrollees for that month had originally enrolled starting in January, in February and so forth. This is really, really important because having "an average" of 100,000 enrollees each month doesn't mean much if it's a different 100,000 people every month--that is, if a lot of people are signing up, having expensive treatments and then dropping out and then replaced by someone else, that hurts the risk pool, since the original batch aren't paying for the other months of the year when they don't require treatment.

As regular readers know, I've been a bit obsessive about tracking down and breaking out ACA Medicaid expansion enrollee numbers. This is more difficult than it sounds, because most Medicaid reports lump expansion enrollees in with the other ~58 million or so Medicaid enrollees; only a handful of states issue separate reports of the expansion-specific population on a regular basis.

Back in late November, I cobbled together the data as best as I could and came up with a total of roughly 11.3 million people nationally. However, that included a lot of 2-year old data and rough estimates.

A couple of weeks later, I stumbled upon a detailed analysis from an anti-ACA financial watchdog organization, the Foundation for Government Accountability, which provided hard numbers and confirmable data source links which included more recent numbers for many states. This brought the total up to over 12.3 million.

OK, all sorts of craziness happening, I've been swamped with stuff, so here's a quick roundup:

KANSAS, MISSOURI, NEVADA, FLORIDA, GEORGIA, INDIANA, OHIO, TEXAS, WASHINGON: CENTENE EXPANDING INTO ACA EXCHANGES:

Health insurer Centene Corp. plans a broad expansion of its Obamacare offerings next year at a time when many of its big rivals are retreating from the program.

Centene said Tuesday that it would sell Affordable Care Act plans in three additional states: Kansas, Missouri and Nevada. The company also said it will expand in six states where it already offers Obamacare plans.

“Centene recognizes there is uncertainty of new health-care legislation, but we are well positioned to continue providing accessible, high quality and culturally-sensitive health-care services,” Chief Executive Officer Michael Neidorff said in the statement.

The company specializes in providing Medicaid coverage for low-income people, and has said the skills it’s honed in that business have helped make it successful in Obamacare markets.

For heaven's sake. Here I sit, painstakingly digging up, downloading, compiling and analysing a mountain of 2018 SERFF rate filing forms for hours on end to find out what the weighted average requested rate hikes are in every state and to then go beyond that to figure out how much of the increases are due to normal factors vs. Trump/Price/GOP-specific sabotage efforts such as the threat to cut off CSR payments and/or not to enforce the individual mandate penalty...

...and then a big healthcare consulting firm like Oliver Wyman goes and steals my thunder by issuing hteir own analysis:

Two market influences, in particular, are complicating 2018 rate setting: the uncertainty surrounding continued funding of cost sharing reduction (CSR) payments and the question of how the relaxation of the individual mandate will impact enrollment and risk pools.

 

Earlier this week I busted the Trump Administration's CMS division for releasing a misleading report which tried to understate the enrollment retention rate of ACA exchange enrollees. I'm not entirely sure why they did this, since even their "fudged" number wasn't really that much worse than previous years (they tried to make itt look like a March attrition rate of 15.4% vs. the 12.8% and 12.6% from 2015 and 2016 respectively), but for whatever reason, they did so. The short version is that they only included enrollees who paid for their January and February policies instead of also including those who paid their March premiums, as was done in previous years. As far as I can figure, the actual 3/31/17 effectuation rate closer to 11.8%, a slight improvement over 2015 and 2016, though I can't be certain about this without knowing how many of the ~500,000 people who signed up in the last 2 weeks of January paid and were effectuated for March coverage.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services is administered by Trump/Price pick Seema Verma, who is openly doing everything possible to trash the ACA and push the AHCA, to the point of allegedly committing borderline extortion in order to help push it through.

Therefore, this came as a bit of as surprise a few days ago (yeah, I'm late to the party on this one...busy week). The lead actuary for CMS, Paul Spitalnic, issued his own scoring of the impact of the AHCA on healthcare coverage, premiums and the federal budget.

It's important to note--as Mr. Spitalnic himself does right at the top of the analysis--that:

Calculating the average requested rate hike in Delaware is easier than most states. This year they officially have 5 carriers participating in the individual market (3 on exchange, 2 off)...but one of those is "Freedom Life" which is a phantom carrier; another is Golden Rule which only has about 120 enrollees; and two of the others are divisions of Aetna, which is dropping out of Delaware's indy market next year altogether. That leaves just Highmark BCBS, unless Golden Rule has surprised me by enrolling a significant number of people off-exchange this year.

Today the Delaware Dept. of Insurance issued this press release:

Highmark Requests 2018 Health Insurance Rate Increase of 33.6%

Date Posted: Wednesday, June 14th, 2017

A couple of days ago, Trump's CMS division of the HHS Dept. released a Q1 2017 ACA exchange effectuation report. This should have been of mild interest to data geeks like me but not especially controversial...except that, as I noted at the time, they played fast & loose with which enrollment/payment data they did and didn't include. As a result, the report made it look like post-open enrollment attrition was dramatically worse in the first quarter of 2017 than it was in previous years. Instead, when you match up the data to match prior years, it looks like the retention rate as of March is actually pretty much exactly the same, or potentially even slightly better.

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