Pennsylvania: FINAL 2019 #ACA rates: 2.4% *lower*, but WOULD have dropped 8.4% w/out #ACASabotage

OK, I had kind of forgotten about this. Back in early June, insurance carriers in Pennsylvania submitted their preliminary 2019 ACA market premium change requests. At the time, they averaged around a 4.9% increase statewide, which seemed pretty impressive under the circumstances.

Then, late July, the PA insurance department issued a press release stating that state regulators had modified the 2019 requests, and that the new, revised average was much lower...a mere 0.7% average rate hike. However, the individual carriers as well as the insurance department made it very clear that this nominal increase included a 6 point rate increase to account for the ACA's individual mandate being repealed and the Trump Administration's expansion of non-ACA compliant short-term and association plans.

I made sure to refer to this as "modified" rather than "final" in the headline, but somehow that got lost in the shuffle, and I entered it as "final" on my state-by-state rate hike spreadsheet by mistake.

Well, that was premature, because today, the Pennsylvania Insurance Department published the actual final, approved 2019 rate changes...and there have been some additional changes. Most of the carriers are pretty close to what they were as of July, but a few dropped substantially (especially Geisinger and QCC), resulting in a statewide, weighted average decrease of around 2.4% overall. That's roughly a 3-point addional drop from July, and a 7.3-point drop from the preliminary filings.

However, none of this has anything to do with the 6-point mandate repeal/#ShortAssPlan expansion factors, which means unsubsidized individual market enrollees will still be paying over $500 more next year than they'd otherwise have to due to those Trump Administration policies: