Wellmark

 

May 11, 2015:

Wellmark spurns Obamacare exchange, but two competitors don't

Moderate-income Iowans who want to use Affordable Care Act subsidies to purchase health insurance still won't be able to choose policies from Wellmark Blue Cross & Blue Shield next year. But they should be offered policies from at least two competitors.

April 25, 2016:

Iowa’s dominant health insurer has agreed to start selling policies a year from now that qualify for Obamacare subsidies.

 

April 25, 2016 (less than 1 year ago):

there's some positive news for Iowa, at least; as noted by Cynthia Cox and reported on by Tony Leys of the Des Moines Register, Wellmark is joining the Iowa exchange next year:

Iowa’s dominant health insurer has agreed to start selling policies a year from now that qualify for Obamacare subsidies.

Wellmark Blue Cross & Blue Shield has not participated in the Affordable Care Act’s online health insurance marketplace, which launched in the fall of 2013. The main effect of the company’s decision was that moderate-income Iowans could not choose Wellmark insurance if they wanted to purchase policies that qualified for new federal subsidies to help pay premiums.

The dominant carrier on the individual market in Iowa is Wellmark BCBS, which had 137,000 enrollees (something like 75% of all the market) last year.

However, there were two important caveats to that: First, Wellmark isn't currently participating on the ACA exchange; all of those enrollees were off-exchange only. Secondly, at the time I had no idea how many of them were ACA-compliant and how many were "grandfathered" or "transitional" policies, which aren't ACA compliant and which, more significantly, aren't part of the same risk pool.

Well, Wellmark just announced that they will finally be jumping onto HealthCare.Gov for 2017. This is great news, not just because they're the dominant carrier in the state but also because it'll help fill the hole created by UnitedHealthcare dropping out.

HOWEVER, I suspect that today's news may also help explain their reasoning (I'll get to that later):

Last month there was much handwringing over the news that UnitedHealthcare has decided to take their ball and go home, pulling out of the individual market in more than 2 dozen states. Shortly after that came the news that Humana is also tidying up their books by dropping individual plans in at least 5 states.

However, capitalism abhors a vacuum. In Iowa, even as UnitedHealthcare is leaving, Wellmark Blue Cross Blue Shield is stepping in to fill the gap there...and today brings some welcome news about another major carrier, Aetna:

Health Insurer Aetna Inc on Wednesday said it plans to continue its Obamacare health insurance business next year in the 15 states where it now participates, and may expand to a few additional states.

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