Massachusetts: Approved 2016 rate hikes: 6.3%

For Massachusetts, I'm not bothering with an actual spreadsheet, as this Boston Globe article has summed up the key numbers:

The new rates will affect about 300,000 people who buy health insurance on their own or work for small businesses with 50 or fewer employees and will renew plans in January.

...The rate hikes approved by the state mean that premiums for individuals and small businesses will rise 6.3 percent next year, on average, but the costs for some plans will rise more, and others less. This year, rates for individuals and small employers rose an average of 3.1 percent in January, after increasing 1.9 percent in 2014.

Unfortunately, the article doesn't break out the individual market from the small business market, but a) that isn't terribly relevant assuming that the 6.3% figure applies to each individually as well as combined and b) I have a pretty good idea of what the MA individual market is anyway.

The MA Health Connector has roughly 170,000 people enrolled in private policies. I presume there's some off-exchange enrollments as well, but probably not too many since Massachusetts has had an ACA-like system in place since 2007 (RomneyCare was, after all, the predecessor for Obamacare). This also means that there's probably very, very few Grandfathered/non-compliant policies still hanging around at this point.

In any event, I'm also assuming that the 6.3% figure is weighted by company market share and individual plan. The article itself is extremely negative (it refers to a 6.3% hike as "troubling" and "more than triple the rest of 2014", etc), but seems accurate otherwise.

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