But a funny thing happened on the way to the governor's office: Bevin's anti-Obamacare rhetoric started to tone down as Election Day approached. And in the months since he's been chief executive of Kentucky,instead of ripping up Obamacare out of his state, Bevin is making alterations to how the law works there and leaving its core elements and benefits in place.
My home state of Michigan has finally published the "Part II - Consumer Justification Narrative" carrier filings for 14 of the 15 carriers offering individual market plans next year. The combined total number of current enrollees comes in at around 390,000 including both on and off-exchange numbers. Last year, Michigan had 560,000 people on the ACA-compliant individual market, so it's important to note that there's likely at least 170,000 people missing from this analysis. However, many of these are likely found here:
UnitedHealthcare is pulling out of the MI market (unknown number of enrollees)
Celtic, Consumer's Mutual, HealthPlus and Time Insurance are all long gone
While I have the data for "Priority Health Plan", their counterpart, "Priority Health Insurance Co." has an unknown number of additional enrollees...and an unknown rate hike request (I don't know if it just hasn't been added to the database yet or what).
It should be noted, however, that last year, "Priority Health Insurance Co." had only about 1/10th as many enrollees as "Priority Health". If that ratio holds up this year, that should only be around 9,000 people, which is unlikely to skew the statewide average up or down by much.
With that in mind, here's how the requested hikes shake out in the Wolverine state for the bulk of indy market enrollees next year:
That's the subheadline of Jonathan Cohn & Jeffrey Young's story this morning about the kind-of, sort-of "replacement plan" for the ACA which Paul Ryan and the House Republicans have finally come up with, more than 6 years after the ACA was signed into law:
The plan, which isn’t legislation and is more like a mission statement, lacks the level of detail that would enable a full analysis, but one thing is clear: If put in place, it would almost surely mean fewer people with health insurance, fewer people getting financial assistance for their premiums or out-of-pocket costs, and fewer consumer protections than the ACA provides.
It’s difficult to be certain, because the proposal, which House Speaker Paul Ryan(R-Wis.) will talk up at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington on Wednesday, lacks crucial information, like estimates of its costs and effects on how many people will have health coverage.
The Idaho insurance department website has made this really easy for me. Most states either don't provide the requested rate hikes at all (forcing me to track them down via a slew of SERFF filing forms) or, if they do provide the rate requests, they don't provide the actual enrollment numbers for each carrier, making it very difficult to run a weighted average.
In the case of Idaho, they don't give the enrollment numbers, but they've already ran the average and posted the weighted number for me! Better yet, they've done this for both the Individual and Small Group markets:
One of the biggest challenges the HHS Dept. has encountered when it comes to enrolling people in ACA exchange policies has been encouraging (or "goading" depending on your POV) millennials into signing up. This is important for several reasons:
Hmmm...this is kind of interesting. As I noted a few weeks ago, here's what the QHP enrollment pattern has looked like in Minnesota since the end of the 2016 Open Enrollment Period:
UPDATE 6/22/16: I've been informed that there was a coding glitch with Utah's website which prevented several carrier rate filings from being listed. I've gone back and plugged in the additional carriers, which account for about 32,000 more Utah residents...but which only moves the weighted average slightly, since Molina's request is fairly close to the 30% average I already had estimated.
This leaves around 93K unaccounted for. Some of them are presumably enrolled via University of Utah plans; U of U's enrollment numbers are redacted, and while the Utah site claims a 0% rate hike, the RR.HC.gov database lists it as 4.47%.
Also, as far as I can tell, "American Medical Security Life Insurance Co." is a branding for UnitedHealthcare, which should clear up that confusion.
The Widespread Slowdown in Health Spending Growth Implications for Future Spending Projections and the Cost of the Affordable Care Act
The United States is on track to spend $2.6 trillion less on health care between 2014 and 2019, compared to initial projections made right after the 2010 passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA).
The Issue
The report uses health expenditure data produced by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and consistently adjusts in each year for the absence of the sustainable growth rate system for physician payment rates in Medicare.
UPDATE: It turns out that Humana is not dropping out of Michigan entirely; they're only dropping their PPO plans, not their HMOs.
I noted last month that like UnitedHealthcare, Humana is pulling out of the individual market in multiple states next year. Unlike United, however, both the number of states and the number of enrollees impacted by Humana's withdrawl is fairly nominal; at the time I counted 5 states and around 25,000 total enrollees. Since then, Humana has confirmed that they're also dropping out of Colorado (9,914 enrollees), for a total of roughly 35,400 people nationally.
Today, I've confirmed that Michigan can be added to the list, impacting 1,717 people enrolled in off-exchange PPO plans. This brings the total to around 37,000 nationally:
