Charles Gaba's blog

There are only two insurance carriers participating in the North Carolina individual market this year: Blue Cross Blue Shield and Cigna. That's expected to change for 2019, as Centene (aka Ambetter) is expected to jump into the NC market, but in terms of premium changes, it's just BCBS and Cigna which can be counted in my 2019 Rate Hike project.

Cigna hasn't released their 2019 filings publicly yet, but they only held around a 4% market share last year (around 21,000 enrollees) so unless they raise or lower rates by a huge amount, it's unlikely to move the needle much one way or the other.

The other 96% of the NC individual market belongs to Blue Cross...and they just issued a very public statement about their intentions for 2019:

BLUE CROSS NC FILES TO LOWER ACA RATES BY AVERAGE OF 4.1 PERCENT
31 Jul 2018

 

Monday afternoon there was a hell of a jaw-dropper out of the Empire State:

Gov. Cuomo just announced that he has directed Supt. Vullo to reject any individual market rate increase that included an increase to compensate for the repeal of the individual mandate

...Assuming that nothing else changes during the rate review process, this makes carriers that didn't associate a % of their rate request with the loss of the mandate big winners...and those who did, not so much.

Sure enough, after watching the half-hour speech by Cuomo, it sure as hell sounded like he was doing exactly that: Instructing the state insurance commissioner to only allow 2019 ACA individual market premiums to increase by around the 12.1% (on average) that they were expecting to go up with the ACA's individual mandate penalty in place instead of the roughly 24% (on average) that they said they'd have to raise them to cancel out the adverse selection impact of the mandate being repealed:

Hot on the heels of Wisconsin's ACA reinsurance program being approved by CMS comes another reinsurance waiver approval, this time for Maine:

The U.S Department of Health and Human Services and the U.S. Department of the Treasury (the Departments) approved Maine’s application for a State Innovation Waiver under section 1332 of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) (the waiver). Maine’s application seeks to reinstate a reinsurance program called the Maine Guaranteed Access Reinsurance Association (MGARA) from 2019 through 2023. As a result of the waiver approval, more consumers in Maine may have coverage, consumers will see lower premiums, and the state will receive Federal funds to cover a substantial portion of state costs for MGARA.

Maine’s State Innovation Waiver under section 1332 of the PPACA is approved subject to the state accepting the specific terms and conditions (STCs). This approval is effective for January 1, 2019 through December 31, 2023.

Summary of Maine’s State Innovation Waiver under section 1332 of the PPACA Application

Michael Capaldo is an employee benefits consultant and self-described "ACA wonk" out of New York.

I don't know him beyond some in-depth wonky online discussions, but I don't see any reason for him to make the following up:

Gov. Cuomo just announced that he has directed Supt. Vullo to reject any individual market rate increase that included an increase to compensate for the repeal of the individual mandate

— Michael Capaldo (@consultbenefits) July 30, 2018

Assuming that nothing else changes during the rate review process, this makes carriers that didn't associate a % of their rate request with the loss of the mandate big winners...and those who did, not so much.

— Michael Capaldo (@consultbenefits) July 30, 2018

There's a lot of fuss and bother yesterday about a brand-new report which tries to project what the costs and savings would be if Bernie Sanders' so-called "Medicare for All" proposal were to actually become law.

The biggest gnashing of teeth was over headlines like this one from CBS and this one from Axios screaming about how "IT WOULD COST $33 TRILLION!!!"

...which is, of course, incredibly disingenous and irresponsible on the face of it for several reasons, primarily because that's over a 10 year period.

January 2018:

It looks to me like after his short-lived 2016 Presidential campaign (seriously, it only lasted 70 days...heck, even Lincoln Chafee's campaign lasted twice as long), Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker decided to go back to shoring up his image in his home state...and since Wisconsin is one of 14 states which doesn't have any term limits for the top spot, it looks like he's scrambling to move back to the center policy-wise just in time to run for a third term this November:

Scott Walker proposes plan to prop up Obamacare marketplace

After years of fighting Obamacare, Gov. Scott Walker is now seeking to stabilize the state marketplace under the law.

New Jersey was one of a handful of states with a newly-full blue government which took swift and decisive action to cancel out some of the worst ACA sabotage efforts of the Trump Administration and Congressional Republicans this year. The following bills were passed by the state legislature and signed by new Governor Phil Murphy:

  • Reinstate the ACA's individual mandate penalty,
  • Establish a robust reinsurance program to significantly lower insurance premiums for individual market enrollees,
  • Protect people from out-of-network "balance billing", and
  • Cancel out Trump's expansion of "Association Health Plans"
  • In addition, New Jersey already outlawed "Short-Term Plans" (and "Surprise Billing") before the ACA was passed anyway.

In the nearly five years I've been operating this website, I've made it clear that while I'm not a fan of the private, for-profit health insurance industry, I have tried to put myself in their shoes when it comes to business decisions about whether or not to participate in the ACA exchange market and so forth.

For instance, when Blue Cross Blue Shield of Tennessee baked a 7.1% premium hike into their projected 2019 premiums to cover themselves in case the #RiskAdjustmentFreeze turned into a years-long saga a few weeks ago, I noted that it was completely understandable, given the history of CMS reneging on contractual promises over the past few years (first with the Risk Corridor Massacre, then with Cost Sharing Reduction reimbursement payments). In other words, you may think health insurance companies are Evil Greedy Monsters, but a contract's a contract.

Even so, it's understandable that the general public usually plays the world's smallest violin for insurers when they see headlines like this:

Regular readers may have noticed that while I've written plenty about non-ACA compliant Short-Term, Limited Duration (STLD) healthcare policies (the "Short" part of my #ShortAssPlans hashtag), I've written far less about the "Ass" part...namely, Association Health Plans (AHPs)

The main reason for this is that I simply don't undertand AHPs as well and don't want to misinform people about them. The other reason is that they sort of have one foot each in the worlds of the Individual and Small Group markets, and I write mostly about the Individual market.

In fact, the only major entry I've written about Association Health Plans specifically was mostly cribbed from a report by Avalere Health:

The report that follows estimates the premium and coverage impact of the DOL proposed rule over a 5-year period (2018-2022). If the rule is finalized as proposed, we estimate the following impacts on the individual and small-group markets:

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