Proposed Insurance Rates Submitted to DOI for Review
Rates Subject to Review
Frankfort, Ky. (June 25, 2019) – Insurance Carriers have submitted proposed rates to the Department of Insurance (DOI) for Kentucky’s 2020 individual and small group markets. Anthem Health Plans of Kentucky, Inc. (Anthem) filed requests for 13 different plans to be offered on the Exchange with a proposed average rate increase of 12%.CareSource Kentucky Co. requested an average rate decrease of 4.5% for 12 different plans to be offered on the Exchange. This decrease follows the 19.4% rate increase approved last year for the 12 plans it offered. The submitted rates are subject to review by the Department.
After some last-minute drama in one state and a surprising lack of drama in another, both New Jersey and Pennsylvania have officially passed bills allowing them to each establish their own ACA exchanges and enrollment platforms, splitting off from the federal exchange and HealthCare.Gov:
UPDATE 8/20/19: I originally posted this in late June. Since then, there have been several important developments: Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have formally rolled out their own official healthcare overhaul plans, with Harris splitting off from Bernie Sanders' fully-mandatory "Medicare for All" bill to her own variant, which keeps the name but has similarities to "Medicare for America". Also, Eric Swalwell and John Hickenlooper have dropped out (ok, not every development was major).
I've updated the post to reflect these changes, while also updating the table graphic, which I've also simplified by removing Swalwell, Hickenlooper and most of the other bottom-rung candidates. I'm keeping everyone who's qualified for the September/October debates as of this writing, plus Tulsi Gabbard, Jay Inslee and Tom Steyer, each of whom is partly qualified.
Not much of an entry, but still: A month ago, the Oregon Division of Financial Regulation posted the requested 2020 rate changes for the Individual and Small Group health insurance markets: 3.3% on average for the Indy market, 8.7% for the sm. group market.
Today, after reviewing the requests from the insurance carriers, the department has posted their "semi-final" rates. These may still see some additional tweaking before the final, approved rates are locked in, but the odds are that these will be the final rates:
Salem — Oregonians can now see the state’s preliminary rate decisions for 2020 individual and small employer health insurance plans. The Division of Financial Regulation must review and approve any rates before they can be charged to policyholders.
Preliminary rate decisions are for individuals who buy their own coverage rather than getting it through an employer and for small businesses.
HOLT: Senator Warren, you signed on to Bernie Sanders’ Medicare-for-all plan. It would put essentially everybody on Medicare and then eliminate private plans that offer similar coverage. Is that the plan or path that you would pursue as president?
WARREN: So, yes. I'm with Bernie on Medicare for all. And let me tell you why.
I spent a big chunk of my life studying why families go broke. And one of the number-one reasons is the cost of health care, medical bills. And that's not just for people who don't have insurance. It's for people who have insurance.
Senator Warren, thank you so much for being here this evening and your tireless advocacy for universal health care. As a supporter of universal health care and an advocate for organized labor, I do worry about the current bill...that would eliminate the private health employer-based plans that so many unions have advocated for. Can you explain how Medicare for all would be better for workers than simply improving the Affordable Care Act?
WARREN: OK, so it's a good question. Let's start with our statement that we should make every time we start to talk about changes in our health care, and that is health care is a basic human right and we fight for basic human rights. And then let's put these in order, because I appreciate that your question starts with the Affordable Care Act. Let's all remember when we're talking about what's possible, let's start where we are and the difference between Democrats and Republicans.
New Jersey’s most powerful state lawmaker said he will delay a vote to create the state’s own online shopping portal for health insurance, one of Gov. Phil Murphy’s priorities intended to guard against the possible repeal of the Affordable Care Act.
The delay means the state won’t meet an Aug. 1 deadline to submit an application to the federal government to create the exchange. The anticipated launch of a Fall 2020 open enrollment period would have to be postponed until 2021, a group of health policy experts warned.
State Senate President Stephen Sweeney, D-Gloucester issued a statement Tuesday affirming his support for creating New Jersey’s own health exchange. Sweeney said he just disagrees with the way fellow lawmakers want to go about it because it doesn’t include a means to automatically enroll low-income people into the Medicaid program.
Jibbers Crabst on a stick. Any time University of Michigan Law Professor Nicholas Bagley begins his Twitter threads with a screenshot of legalese, it's bad news.
First, here's his full thread:
The panel in the Fifth Circuit that's about to hear Texas v. United States has just asked for further briefing on standing -- and in particular on whether the intervenor states and the House of Representatives can properly appeal the case.
I know I rip on Republicans a lot here at ACASignups.net, and I stand by pretty much all of it. Once in a while, however, a GOP member of Congress does do (or tries to do) something useful when it comes to healthcare policy...and the name most often attached to that is Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee. Alexander happens to be retiring, I should note. These two facts may or may not be connected, but I digress.
In any event, Sen. Alexander and Democratic Senator Patty Murray of Washington State have been working together for quite some time now on several healthcare bills to help stabilize the ACA, reduce drug prices and so forth, to varying degrees of success. I may not have agreed with most of Alexander's ideas, but he seems to be genuinely interested in improving the situation...and of course I can't say enough good things about Sen. Murray.
Regular readers may have noticed that I didn't post a single blog entry on Tuesday even though there's been a ton of healthcare policy stuff going on. No, I didn't take the day off; I started poring over a spreadsheet at around 10am and was working on it almost nonstop all day.
Big news: SCOTUS is taking up the ACA risk corridors case. GOP's decision to stymie that program arguably did the most damage to the ACA marketplaces. https://t.co/VeMRcd5MYn
When the ACA was first developed and voted on, lawmakers knew that the disruption to the individual health insurance market was going to be pretty rocky for the first few years, so they put three types of market stabilization programs into place. They were known as the "Three 'R's"...Risk Adjustment, Reinsurance and Risk Corridors:
...Risk adjustment interrupts these cycles by doing exactly what its name implies. It adjusts for differences in the health of plans’ enrollees by redistributing funds from companies with healthier-than-average customers to plans with sicker-than-average customers. Such transfers could occur within or across health plan tiers in the exchanges (bronze, silver, gold, platinum). All the redistributed monies come from insurance companies in the marketplaces. No taxpayer bailout here.
I'm neither an attorney nor a Constitutional expert, so this may not have any legal significance beyond confirming what everyone already knew about the Trump Administration. Then again, perhaps it will.
Several studies, including this one from just the other day, have driven home this point clearly: Adding work requirements to Medicaid expansion enrollees serves no useful purpose other than to kick tens of thousands of people off of their healthcare coverage (which, of course, is the whole point from the POV of those who add the requirements).
As for the one positive-sounding goal (increasing employment) which supporters always use to try and justify them, that's a complete joke:
The first major study on the nation’s first Medicaid work requirements finds that people fell off of the Medicaid rolls but didn’t seem to find more work.
As I've noted several times, one of the biggest flaws in the Affordable Care Act is a very simple one on paper: The Subsidy Cliff. People who enroll in ACA exchange policies are entitled to financial assistance on a sliding scale...but only if their household incomes fall between 100-400% of the Federal Povery Level. Those below the lower threshold (actually, below 138% FPL) are expected to enroll in Medicaid, but those over the upper threshold of 400% FPL (around $50,000/year for a single person, roughly $103,000/year for a family of four) are completely on their own.
Here's the current federal premium subsidy formula (the precise premium cap percentages change slightly from year to year...and the Trump Administration is even messing with that a bit, so I'm not sure what it'll be in 2020):
In other words, only about 10% (at most) of those still in the Medicaid Gap could even remotely match the GOP's cliche of a "lazy, good-for-nothing layabout" type who's able-bodied, has no serious extenuating circumstances and so forth. The "get off your ass and work!" requirements appear to be nearly as big a waste of time and resources as the infamous "drug testing for welfare recipients" bandwagon which a bunch of states jumped on board over the past few years.
One Ohio resident paid $240 a month for health insurance that she later learned didn’t cover her knee replacement. Saddled with $48,000 in medical bills, she decided not to get the other knee replaced.
...A Kansas resident paid premiums on a policy for two years, then found out his insurance would not cover surgery for a newly diagnosed cancer.
The two policyholders have filed a lawsuit in federal court against Health Insurance Innovations, based in Tampa, Fla., accusing the company of misleading them about the kind of policy they were buying.
They say they believed they were purchasing Affordable Care Act plans that include coverage guarantees. But they were sold much less comprehensive coverage that left them vulnerable to tens of thousands of dollars in unpaid medical bills, according to the lawsuit.
The state of Maine's Bureau of Professional & Financial Regulation has released their preliminary 2020 rate filings for the Individual and Small Group markets. Overall, the three carriers participating in their individual market are seeking a weighted average rate increase of 4.7% vs. last year. If approved as is, that would bring the average unsubsidized premium up from $675/month to $707/month, or around $381/year.
It's important to keep in mind why premiums are going up. I've included screenshots of the rate filing memos--Maine Community Health Options, which holds over 50% of the individual marketshare, clarifies that the combination of the individual mandate being repealed and the expansion of #ShortAssPlans are causing an 11% increase. They also note that Maine's recent Medicaid expansion implementation may be a factor, although normally that reduces premiums since lower-income populations tend to be less healthy than higher-income populations, so I'm not sure what to make of that.
As a reminder, here's the eight bills which passed the full House:
H.R. 938, the "Bringing Low-cost Options and Competition while Keeping Incentives for New Generics (BLOCKING) Act of 2019," introduced by Reps. Kurt Schrader (D-OR) and Buddy Carter (R-GA), would discourage parking of 180-day exclusivity by a first generic applicant that is blocking the approval of other generics.
H.R. 1499, the "Protecting Consumer Access to Generic Drugs Act of 2019," introduced by Rep. Bobby Rush (D-IL), would make it illegal for brand-name and generic drug manufacturers to enter into agreements in which the brand-name drug manufacturer pays the generic manufacturer to keep a generic equivalent off the market.
Bill expanding ‘Insure Oklahoma’ program passes Senate committee
A Senate bill seeking to expand the Insure Oklahoma program has advanced out of committee Monday morning.
Senate Bill 605, authored by Sen. Greg McCortney, R-Ada, directs the Oklahoma Healthcare Authority to implement "the Oklahoma Plan" within Insure Oklahoma. An agency spokesperson said the program provides premium assistance to low-income working adults employed by small businesses.
The latest numbers from Insure Oklahoma show less than 19,000 are enrolled.
According to McCortney, the intent of his bill is to provide insurance for Oklahomans who would qualify for Medicaid in states which opted to expand but are currently not insured.
Last year, I noted several times that regardless of what your opinion may be of the ACA's Individual Mandate Penalty (which was, until this year, either $695 per adult/$348 per child or 2.5% of your household income, unless you received an exemption), one of the key things to keep in mind about the penalty is that any impact it has on encouraging people to go ahead and enroll in ACA-compliant healthcare coverage is entirely dependent on two things:
Last May, I noted that Vermont was supposedly joining Massachusetts, New Jersey (and later in the year, the District of Columbia) in reinstating the ACA's Individual Mandate Penalty, which added an additional tax to people who don't enroll in ACA-compliant healthcare coverage (whether private or public) and who don't qualify for an exemption due to an affordability threshold, hardship or some other qualifying reason.
Strike One:Vermont's mandate won't go into effect until 2020, leaving a one-year gap. This bill getting signed is still good news, but mostly irrelevant for 2019. The "coordinated outreach efforts" part is really more of a counter to the Trump Administration's slashing of the ACA's marketing/outreach budget...but not really, since Vermont already runs their own exchange and should have their own marketing/outreach budget anyway. So this is more of a token gesture, I'd guess.
Along with Massachusetts and Vermont, the District of Columbia merges their Individual and Small Group markets for purposes of risk pools and risk adjustment. This does not, however, necessarily mean that their Indy and Sm. Group average premium changes are identical. For one thing, there are more carriers which offer small group plans than individual market plans; for another, the market share ratios between the two differ.
Washington, DC – The District of Columbia Department of Insurance, Securities and Banking (DISB) received 181 proposed health insurance plan rates for review from Aetna, CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield, Kaiser Permanente and United Healthcare in advance of open enrollment for plan year 2020 on DC Health Link, the District of Columbia’s health insurance marketplace.
Last year individual market carriers here in my home state of Michigan only raised premiums 1.7% on average in 2019, with Oscar Insurance Co. being a new addition to the market. For 2020, they're reducing average premiums by about 2.0%. Oscar made very little headway in their debut year, only enrolling 649 people statewide.
On the surface, it looks like Michigan's total ACA-compliant individual market has plummeted by a whopping 18% (281K vs. 344K last year). However, this can be misleading because the enrollment numbers listed each year only include the number of enrollees actually impacted by the rate changes. For instance, if a carrier pulls out of half the state, then a chunk of their current total enrollment won't be listed since enrollees in that half aren't seeing their current premiums change...they'll be losing coverage altogether and will have to switch to a different carrier.
On Tuesday, May 21, Governor John Bel Edwards issued an executive order launching the Protecting Health Coverage in Louisiana Task Force after efforts to have protections offered to Louisianans with preexisting conditions repealed.
There's another Congressional healthcare hearing going on right now as well, this time in the House Energy & Commerce Committee; this one is on Surprise Billing:
HEARING ON “NO MORE SURPRISES: PROTECTING PATIENTS FROM SURPRISE MEDICAL BILLS”
The Subcommittee on Health of the Committee on Energy and Commerce will hold a legislative hearing on Wednesday, June 12, 2019, at 10 a.m. in the John D. Dingell Room, 2123 of the Rayburn House Office Building. The hearing is entitled, “No More Surprises: Protecting Patients from Surprise Medical Bills.”
The New Mexico Office of the Superintendent of Insurance website just posted the preliminary 2020 insurance rate filings. Here's the full list, which includes a mish-mash of Individual Market, Large Group and Small Group Market policies, with a Pediatric Dental standalone plan thrown in as well.
It's worth noting that the NM carriers are being very careful to separate out on & off-exchange policies into separate listings even though they're all part of the same risk pool, and they're even separating out off-exchange "Mirrored" policies, which refers to CSR Silver Switching; this is a very good thing.
I've cleaned up the listings and plugged in the weighted average rate increases in the table below this one:
Legislation calls for reinsurance program to aid people with extremely high health insurance premiums
Lawmakers have introduced legislation this week that would create a reinsurance program to help lower the cost of premiums for Delawareans who do not get insurance through their employers.
House Bill 176, which has no Republican co-sponsors, would stabilize the individual health insurance market and help Delawareans struggling with extremely highhealthcare costs to get relief, a release from House Democrats stated.
Last week I noted that Pennsylvania is joining Nevada, New Mexico, New Jersey and (apparently) Oregon in moving away from the federal ACA exchange mothership known as HealthCare.Gov:
Pennsylvania moves to take over health insurance exchange
Pennsylvania is moving to take over the online health insurance exchange that’s been operated by the federal government since 2014, saying it can cut health insurance costs for the hundreds of thousands who buy the individual Affordable Care Act policies.
...The bill is backed by Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, and his administration says it would make two important changes to reduce premiums for the 400,000 people who purchase health insurance through the Healthcare.gov online marketplace.
Earlier today I noted that RateReview.HealthCare.Gov, which is a public-facing searchable database for annual health insurance policy premium rate changes, has gone through some updates on the ACA-Compliant side.
I also noted that the other section of the database, which tracks non-ACA compliant rate changes for "Transitional Plans" and "Student Plans", may have had some updates as well, but it's hard to say since I've poked around there so rarely. This morning I decided to rectify that by searching through the entire Transitional/Student plan database and compiling the results. Unlike the ACA side, there's no way of filtering it out by year, so the following table includes every rate change filing entry listed...and the results surprised me:
Warning: There's perhaps 100 people on the planet who'll have any interest in this post. Fortunately, most of those 100 people read this site regularly.
Every year, I spend months painstakingly tracking every insurance carrier rate filing for the following year to determine just how much average insurance policy premiums on the individual market are projected to increase or decrease. There are hundreds of insurance carriers nationally, with dozens of forms apiece, some of which follow no hard formatting guidelines, and most of which are revised at least once over the course of the spring, summer and fall before being locked in for the upcoming open enrollment period. It's a pretty imposing task.
In my latest post, I revisited a project which I originally took a crack at last year: Attempting to track every action or legislation introduced, voted on, passed, signed and implemented by every state to protect, repair and/or improve the Affordable Care Act.
At the time I was trying to list the actual legislation and every change in status from start to finish (including bills which died in committee, faile in one house or the other, were vetoed, etc). I quickly discovered that it was next to impossible to keep up with all of that.
This time I took a simpler approach--I only list bills or executive orders which have either been fully approved/implemented or which are pending/in progress. I do plan on going back to updating the spreadsheet, however.
As I noted the other day, some of my blog posts don't have any insight to add, they're purely for aggregating data points. This is one of those posts.
Here's the Connect for Health Colorado May enrollment dashboard report. It doesn't provide much detail, and it's kind of fuzzy/hard to read, but I do like the way it shows both QHP selections (that is, how many people selected exchange policies) as well as effectuated enrollments from month to month.
Remember, around 10% of those who select plans never end up actually paying the first month's premium, and are thus never actually enrolled...and there's some amount of churn after that as people drop their coverage mid-year and new people enroll via Special Enrollment Periods. Then the whole process starts over again the following January.
As a result, you see a gradual divergence between QHP selections increasing and effectuated enrollments decreasing throughout the year...only to reset in January of the next year.
Over the past year or so I've written numerous entries about Michigan Republicans pushing through an ineffective, inefficient, cruel and pointless work requirement addition to Michigan's implementation of Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act, culminating in this one:
New work requirements for people in Michigan's Medicaid expansion group could cause as many as 183,000 people to lose their coverage.
Anywhere between 9 and 27 percent of the approximately 680,000 people enrolled in the Michigan Healthy Plan - or 61,000 to 183,000 recipients - could be kicked of the rolls.
That's up to three times what was estimated by the House Fiscal Agency when the work requirement bill was passed last year. The work requirements are scheduled to take effect on January 1, 2020.
Sometimes I don't have anything particularly useful to add to a data point. New Hampshire is one of the very few states which don't operate their own ACA exchange which does keep track of (and, more importantly, report) ACA exchange enrollment on a regular basis, via a monthly report.
New Hampshire enrolled 44,581 people in individual market QHPs during open enrollment this year, so the 40,728 enrolled as of May shows an impressive 91% retention rate.
Their SHOP enrollment is around ~1,300 people working for ~230 small businesses.
Pennsylvania is moving to take over the online health insurance exchange that’s been operated by the federal government since 2014, saying it can cut health insurance costsfor the hundreds of thousands who buy the individual Affordable Care Act policies.
New legislation unveiled Tuesday has high-level support in Pennsylvania's House of Representatives, with the chamber's Republican and Democratic floor leaders as the bill's lead co-sponsors.
A House committee vote was scheduled for Wednesday, underscoring the urgency of the legislation.
The bill is backed by Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, and his administration says it would make two important changes to reduce premiums for the 400,000 people who purchase health insurance through the Healthcare.gov online marketplace.
In Idaho's case, this was always the plan from the start; they simply didn't have time to launch their own exchange before the 2014 Open Enrollment Period, so they bumped it back a year. Idaho is about to lose that unique status, however, in a big way.
The bill is actually a suite of a dozen smaller bills. Nearly all of them are sponsored purely by Democrats, which isn't surprising...but there's one exception:
I was surprised to realize that I haven't written a word about Wisconsin since before the midterm election last fall, when Democrat Tony Evers defeated Republican incumbent Scott Walker. Since then, the state has actually gone through a lot of turmoil regarding healthcare policy (and every other policy as well, of course). The GOP still controls both the state House and Senate, so during the lame duck session they tried to pull a whole mess of crap legislation to strip Evers of his authority before he even took office...as well as that of incoming Democratic state Attorney General, Josh Kaul, to prevent him from withdrawing from the plaintiff's side in the #TexasFoldEm lawsuit, among other things.
In the 5 1/2 years that I've been running this website, I've received several honors and accolades, ranging from interviews and profile pieces, to being a finalist in the National Institute for Health Care Management (NIHCM) digital media awards, to even having my work included in not one, but two comic books.
Today I'm honored and humbled to note that I've now had...my portrait painted for an art exhibit. No, seriously.
Politically, it's generally better to underpromise and overdeliver. Unfortunately, when it comes to the actual legislative process it's usually the other way around.
Case in point: Connecticut.
It was just twelve days ago that Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont rolled out his proposed ACA improvement policy package, which included a bunch of key elements including the ballyhooed "Connecticut Option"...a Public Option which would have opened up the existing state employee healthcare plan to anyone on the individual or small group markets.
The full suite was supposed to include nine major provisions:
Lawmaker proposes Medicaid buy-in and individual mandate for Oregonians
Representative Andrea Salinas, the new Chair of the House Health Care Committee, recently filed a bill that aims to establish a Medicaid buy-in option for Oregon residents. The bill, HB 2009, would also establish a “shared responsibility penalty,” or an individual mandate for Oregonians.
HB 2009 would essentially allow individuals who do not qualify for Medicaid, or for premium tax credits under the Affordable Care Act, to enroll in CCOs by paying premiums to cover their health services.
PROVIDENCE — The state Senate approved legislation Thursday intended to protect Rhode Islanders’ access to health insurance in the face of threats to the federal Affordable Care Act.
The legislation was sponsored by Sen. Joshua Miller, D-Cranston, chairman of the Senate Health and Human Services Committee. The House version of the bill was sponsored by Rep. Joseph M. McNamara, D-Warwick, chairman of the House Health, Education and Welfare Committee. The bill aims to ensure that the standards of the Affordable Care Act remain in effect in Rhode Island, even if the courts or Congress were to eliminate the federal laws that created it.
Thirteen health insurers request record-low increase of less than 1%; Two new insurers join individual market in 2020
June 3, 2019
OLYMPIA, Wash. – Thirteen health insurers filed a record-low average proposed rate increase of 0.96% for the 2020 individual health insurance market. Also, two new insurers — PacificSource Health Plans and Providence Health Plan — are joining Washington’s market next year.
All 39 counties will have at least one insurer selling inside the Exchange, Washington Healthplanfinder.
...voters were only dimly aware of candidates’ and elected officials’ health proposals.
...These voters are not tuned into the details — or even the broad outlines — of the health policy debates going on in Washington and the campaign, even though they say health care will be at least somewhat important to their vote.
Many had never heard the term “Medicare for all”...
2020 INDIVIDUAL AND SMALL GROUP REQUESTED RATE ACTIONS
5/31/2019 - Health insurers in New York have submitted their requested rates for 2020, as set forth in the charts below. These are the rates proposed by health insurers, and have not been approved by DFS.
* Indicates the Company offers products on the NY State of Health Marketplace.
The NY DFS website also includes handy links to the actual enrollment numbers for every carrier on both the Individual and Small Group market, allowing me to break out the numbers further:
