2018 Rate Hikes: Rhode Island (early look)

Rhode Island just released their 2018 Individual and Small Group market rate hike requests, and they're pretty straightforward. For the small group market, I don't have the weighted market share for each carrier, but overall it ranges from 5.8 - 12.8%, with an unweighted average of 8.8%.

On the individual market, as with 2017, there's only two carriers participating in 2018: BCBS of RI and Neighborhood Health Plan. They're asking for a 13.8% and 5.0% increase respectively, with a weighted average of 10.5%.

BCBS gave their enrollment as around 27,000; for Neighborhood, I estimated theirs based on dividing their projected total member months by 12 to get 16,345. RI's on-exchange enrolment was 29,456 during Open Enrollment this year, so that would leave roughly 12,800 off-exhange enrollees, for roughly a 2:1 on/off-exchange ratio, which sounds about right.

Niether carrier says anything about CSR payments or mandate enforcement, so I'm operating on the assumption that these filings assume the former will be made and the latter will be enforced (i.e., no TrumpTax here). I'm using the Kaiser Family Foundation's general assumption of a 19% additional rate spike for the with Trump Tax scenario, bringing the worst-case scenario up to 29.5%.

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