Vermont

...well, not a whole lot, to be perfectly frank.

Vermont has been pretty much on radio silence for the past two years. They issued fairly regular enrollment data reports in 2014 and 2015, but last year there was nary a peep; the only mid-season enrollment report with Vermont data was the official one released by CMS in early January.

I was, therefore, pretty happy to see a link to their "2018 Open Enrollment Update" posted earlier this afternoon.

Unfortunately...

Open Enrollment Countdown: Just 15 Days Left to Sign up for 2018 Health Coverage

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Vermont was one of the first states I analyzed back in the late spring; obvoiusly a lot has changed since then, so I updated/revised my analysis of their requested rate hikes for 2018 a couple of weeks ago, with requested average increases of 11.9% if CSR payments are made or 21.6% if they aren't.

Yesterday, Louise Norris gave me a heads up that the Vermont regulators have issued their approved rate increases for the two carriers operating on the individual and small group markets in the tiny state. This makes Vermont the 4th state to announce their approved rates for next year, joining Oregon, Maryland and New York.

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:

Vermont is the 4th state to post their initial 2018 rate filings. Vermont has a couple of unusual policies re. their healthcare market: First, while they do technically have an off-exchange individual market, those policies are all fully ACA-compliant QHPs and are tracked exactly the same as on-exchange QHPs, meaning this dashboard report from February includes just about all of their individual market enrollees: 28,775 on exchange + 5,662 off-exchange, for a total of 34,437 ACA-compliant enrollees. Vermont didn't allow transitional plans, so aside from an unknown number still enrolled in grandfathered plans, that should represent their entire individual market.

Along with today's HHS report which confirms more than 11.5 million 2017 QHP selections as of Christmas Eve, CMS has released an additional report which breaks the numbers out by state...and unlike HC.gov's "snapshot" reports (which only cover 39 states), the CMS/ASPE report also confirms the enrollment numbers for all 50 states (PDF).

As I've noted before, until today, there was one state which I had no OE4 data for whatsoever: Vermont (which is ironic given their historic support of healthcare reform, including Sen. Bernie Sanders). This blank has been filled in by today's supplemental CMS/ASPE report: 29,021 QHP selections as of 12/24, which is actually quite a bit higher than I expected for the state (my target for VT is only 30,000 total through 1/31).

Last month I noted (well, after Louise Norris called my attention to it) that after 2 years of restricting all individual market enrollments to their still-buggy ACA exchange, the state of Vermont actually reversed this policy for 2016 by allowing individuals to enroll in ACA-compliant policies directly through the carriers after all.

This actually goes against the recommendations I just wrote about yesterday, leaving the District of Columbia as the only other exchange to require all indy plans to run through it), but given how many technical problems Vermont seems to still be having with their platform, I can understand them allowing direct enrollment for the time being. I stand by my recommendation that every state should eventually move everything onto the exchange in the future, however.

I noted back in February that Vermont Health Connect, VT's ACA exchange, has remained essentially silent since last fall, issuing only 2 press releases since Open Enrollment started last November (one of which was about a new plan comparison tool, the other of which was about some sort of Medicaid-related dealine). In other words, they haven't publicized their 2016 enrollment numbers whatsoever...the only reason I have data for VT at all is thanks to the official ASPE reports from the HHS Dept. This is a stunning 180º turnaround from 2015, when they were issuing detailed reports on a regular basis.

Like most states, Vermont does have an account with the SERFF database system for insurance rate filings. Until today, I assumed that they just hadn't posted the 2017 filings yet, since there's only one unrelated listing there at the moment.

However, thanks to an anonymous tipster for reminding me that Vermont also has their own, in-house rate review website...and the state is pretty easy to run the math on due to the fact that....

  • There's only 2 carriers in the state even offering individual or small group policies at all,
  • Under state law, all individual/small group policies have to be sold on the ACA exchange anyway, and
  • Unlike most states, Vermont is apparently requiring that the risk pools for individual & small group policies be merged, so there's only 1 set of rate changes his year (last year they did have slightly different average rate hikes for the two markets).

Anyway, here's the deal:

As I noted last week, Your Health Idaho has released their final official OE3 number. I had previously noted that there were only 8 states in which the exchanges appeared to have performed worse on private policy enrollment in 2016 than they did in 2015, and that most of those had special circumstances:

Over the past few months, I've ranted repeatedly about what a stupid, short-sighted, petty move it is of Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin to shut down the kynect ACA exchange, for a variety of reasons...most of which center around the fact that the kynect exchange has been operating smoothly since the moment it launched in October 2013. In other words, there's very little reason to kill kynect, and plenty of reasons to keep it operational.

This does not mean that I'm opposed to moving any state-based exchanges over to Healthcare.Gov. As I said back in June, right after the King v. Burwell decision came out:

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