UnitedHealth Group is pulling out of New Jersey’s Obamacare marketplace in 2017.
The company’s subsidiary, Oxford Health Plans, will stop offering individual plans on the state’s federally facilitated health insurance marketplace, according to a letter from the state Department of Banking and Insurance.
The letter was obtained by POLITICO through an Open Public Records Act request and the company later confirmed it will not offer exchange plans next year.
“Individuals impacted by these decisions will continue to have access to their current health benefits until the end of 2016, when they will need to pick new plans for 2017. Our small and large group business, Medicare and Medicaid businesses will not be impacted by this decision,” the company said in an emailed statement.
The good news is that it's easy to use, and lists all of the carrier rate hike requests in a clearcut manner...except, oddly, for CHRISTUS, which I'm pretty sure is being offered this year.
The bad news is that it doesn't include any of the actual market share/enrollment numbers, making it impossible to come up with a weighted average. Some of these are available via redacted filings over at the federal RateReview.Healthcare.Gov site, but not all of them. I have New Mexico Health Connections estimated at 48,000 based on this report, but I have no idea how many CHRISTUS or Presbyterian enrollees there are.
The RateReview site lists CHRISTUS as ranging from 9.4 - 15.2%, but without market share numbers I can't even come up with a proper rate hike request, so I've split the difference for now at 12.3%.
Well, now...this is about as cut & dry as it gets! They don't display the actual enrollment numbers for each carrier, but that's OK because the only real reason I need it in the first place is to weight the increases by market share...which the New York Dept. of Financial Services has helpfully already done!
And there you have it: A weighted average requested rate increase of 17.3% across the entire state's ACA-compliant individual market. Remember that NY never allowed transitional plans anyway, and there are likely only a handful of grandfathered plans left on the individual market, so this should cover well over 90% of the market.
They also included the Small Group market, which I take note of when available but don't really track nearly as closely as the indy market:
Many single payer advocates have been either confused or angry with me (to put it mildly) for not being a fan of Bernie Sanders's proposed national SP plan.
I've explained repeatedly that while I am a SP proponent, I just don't see it happening at the national level all at once. There are too many barricades and too many logistical, economic and political problems in doing so to make it remotely feasible to bring SP to the country in this fashion. In addition, I have major problems with the utter lack of detail in Bernie's plan.
HOWEVER, I've also repeatedly stated that I do strongly support getting the ball rolling at a smaller level first--either by partially expanding existing SP programs such as (Medicare, Medicaid, CHIP); consolidating existing private systems into larger risk pools (ie, merging the risk pools of the individual & small group markets, as a few states have done already); and/or by getting SP enacted at the state level, then using that as a model for other states and/or as a national model if it works out.
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For 2017, UnitedHealthcare, along with most of its subsidiaries, is discontinuing its participation in the individual market in Colorado, both on and off the exchange. However, Golden Rule Insurance, a subsidiary of UnitedHealthcare, will continue to offer its individual plans in Colorado off of the exchange. UnitedHealthcare will also continue its small and large group business in the state.
Humana will continue in the small group market for 2017 off the exchange, while exiting the individual market for both Humana Health Plans and Humana Insurance Company.
A few weeks ago I reported on some weirdness in New Hampshire's monthly exchange QHP enrollment data. They were showing an unusually high effectuated enrollment drop-off between March and April, especially odd considering that enrollment had supposedly increased from February to March.
A week or so ago, I reported that Connect for Health Colorado's monthly enrollment report contained some very confusing numbers:
Last month I noted that, assuming I was reading Connect for Health Colorado's monthly dashboard report correctly, they were down to 115,890 effectuated exchange enrollees as of 3/31/16, or a whopping 23.1% lower than the official APTC report tally of 150,769 QHP selections as of the end of Open Enrollment.
...The 121,962 number at the top seems to be the one I want...except that it also includes SHOP and standalone Dental enrollments (I think).
...OK, so 121,962 includes SHOP, which has a maximum tally of 2,897, which means that the effectuated number as of 4/30/16 could be as low as 119,065...except that "Individual" could also potentially include standalone dental plans, confusing the issue further. Even worse, it says that this "Includes those who effectuated in the current plan year and later terminated a policy".
I can't tell whether that means that those who terminated their policies have been subtracted from the total (accounted for) or if they're included in the total (cumulative).
Like most states, Vermont does have an account with the SERFF database system for insurance rate filings. Until today, I assumed that they just hadn't posted the 2017 filings yet, since there's only one unrelated listing there at the moment.
However, thanks to an anonymous tipster for reminding me that Vermont also has their own, in-house rate review website...and the state is pretty easy to run the math on due to the fact that....
There's only 2 carriers in the state even offering individual or small group policies at all,
Under state law, all individual/small group policies have to be sold on the ACA exchange anyway, and
Unlike most states, Vermont is apparently requiring that the risk pools for individual & small group policies be merged, so there's only 1 set of rate changes his year (last year they did have slightly different average rate hikes for the two markets).
