Arizona: Preliminary *unweighted* avg. 2022 #ACA premiums: -4.8% indy market; +7.8% sm. group

The good news is that the federal Rate Review database has now posted the preliminary avg. 2022 rate filings for the individual and small group markets for every state. This makes it very easy to plug in the average requested rate changes in 2021 for every carrier participating in both markets.

The bad news is that most of the underlying filing forms are heavily redacted, meaning I can't use the RR database to acquire the other critical data I need in order to run a proper weighted average: The number of people actually enrolled in the policies for each carrier.

This means that in cases where this data isn't available elsewhere (either the state's insurance department website, the SERFF database or otherwise), I'm limited to running an unweighted average. This can make a huge difference...if one carrier is requesting a 10% increase and the other is keeping prices flat, that's a 5.0% unweighted average rate hike...but if the first carrier has 99,000 enrollees and the second only has 1,000, that means the weighted average is actually 9.9%.

With that in mind, here's the preliminary filings for Arizona carriers: An unweighted average 4.76% reduction on the individual market (ranging from -22.3% +9.5%), and an unweighted average 7.8% increase on the small group market (ranging from +2.1% to +14.7%).

The biggest news on the Arizona ACA market for 2022 is that Banner/Aetna CVS is newly entering several counties statewide; since they're new, they have no baseline premium rates to measure against: