Some relatively welcome news going into the home stretch: After a series of ugly (over 20%) rate hike averages from Alabama, Delaware, South Dakota and especially Minnesota, I've just completed the Virginia analysis:
Unlike many other states, there's no guesswork or educated guesses here; the Virginia Dept. of Insurance SERFF filings are quite complete and straightforward, so I have every company providing individual and/or sm. group coverage listed, both on and off the exchange, with the exact average rate changes and affected enrollee numbers for pratically every one of them.
The only exceptions are Piedmont Community Healthcare HMO, whose SERFF filings, oddly, included the enrollee count but not the rate change (usually it's the other way around). In addition, there's a couple of new additions to each (UHC of Mid-Atlantic on the indy market, Federated Mutual on the sm. group market). However, none of these have large enough enrollment numbers to amount to more than a rounding error in either category.
CodeBaby, a provider of Intelligent virtual assistant technology, today announced Connect for Health Colorado® and Access Health CT have expanded the use of CodeBaby as a way to increase consumer education and improve the online experience for customers purchasing health insurance during the 2016 open enrollment period.
Connect for Health’s virtual assistant, Kyla, can be found at key points in the website, presenting important information in a clear manner, assisting users in making informed decisions, and providing decision support for critical choices. In time for this year’s open enrollment, Connect for Health has expanded Kyla to the Subsidy Eligibility System so that the avatar can answer questions, help people determine if they are eligible for subsidies, and walk them through the enrollment process.
Gov. Shumlin Updates on Vermont Health Connect Progress
MONTPELIER – Gov. Peter Shumlin, representatives from Vermont’s insurance carriers, and officials and staff from Vermont Health Connect (VHC) gathered today to update on the health insurance marketplace’s progress. The Governor announced that the technology upgrade necessary for a smooth open enrollment has been delivered and tested and will be deployed starting this evening; the backlog of change of circumstance cases has been cleared; VHC is now operating at a vastly improved customer service level for change requests; and customers will be able to report many changes online starting Monday. Meeting those milestones is consistent with the schedule laid out by the Governor in March 2015 and in legislation passed later in the spring.
NOTE: I originally posted this at 3:00pm October 1st. Shortly after that, I heard the news about the Oregon massacre. I seriously debated changing the headline, but decided that it was completely appropriate under the circumstances. If you disagree...well, we just have to disagree.
In 1991, conservative writer/humorist P.J. O'Rourke wrote a book called, fittingly enough, "Parliment of Whores". It was, as the title explains, "A Lone Humorist Attempts to Explain the Entire U.S. Government". The 9th chapter is entitled "Would you kill your mother to pave I-95?" The main point of this chapter, as you can probably imagine, is that there's a limited amount of money in any budget which can be set aside for various programs and departments, which in turn means that Tough Choices have to be made all the time:
When I crunched the numbers for Minnesota's requested rate hikes, the results were pretty scary-looking; based on partial data, I estimated that the weighted average was something like a 37% overall requested increase:
Note that there were several crucial missing numbers: I didn't know the actual market share for several companies (I made a rough guess based on an estimate of the total missing enrollments), nor did I know what the requested increases were for Medica or PreferredOne, other than thinking that both were under 10%.
With the 2016 Open Enrollment Period quickly approaching (it launches on November 1st), the Maryland Health Connection has already officially launched 2016 Window Shopping!
They even whipped up a simple video stepping you through the process (oddly, the background music seems to have been lifted from "There's Something About Mary", which is either a good or bad omen depending on your POV):
Over the weekend I finally started plugging every state which have 2016 premium hike data for into a chart to see if any patterns were showing up, but I was still missing 6 states. I concluded that Medicaid expansion does not appear to be a major factor (or, at least, not an obvious one), but that there are two other clear trends:
First, states which are allowing "transitional" plans through next year are definitely seeing higher percentage rate hikes than those which stuck to their guns and discontinued non-ACA compliant policies.
Second, states which have only published requested rate changes are currently noticeably higher on average than those which have been put through the regulatory approval process.
Today I'm posting updated versions of all three charts, with some slight updates:
For most of the states I'm analyzing, I have hard enrollment numbers for the insurance carriers requesting rate hikes over 10%; it's the remaining companies (the ones seeking hikes of less than 10%) which are generally the big unknowns.
In Mississippi's case, this is flipped around: There appear to only be 4 companies offering individual policies in the entire state, and while I'm missing the enrollment number for the biggest one (BCBSMS), I can calculate a pretty close estimate due to a unique factor: Neither of the two asking for >10% hikes are offering exchange-based policies:
Assuming subsidies remain in place, none of the individual plans available in Mississippi’s exchange have requested double digit rate increases for 2016. The only exchange plan requesting a rate increase of ten percent or more is a small group plan from United HealthCare. Rate increases of at least ten percent are published on Healthcare.gov’s rate review tool, and the only individual market Mississippi plans on the list are off-exchange.
As with many other states, I'm working with limited enrollment and rate change data here, so plenty of caveats abound. However, Alabama's 2014 individual market was only around 206,000 people, and the ACA-compliant market should be roughly the same this year. I can account for 176,000 of that, so the remaining 30K or so are unknown other than being split among a half-dozen companies which requested rate changes of below 10% increases.
Assuming around 7% on average for the balance, Alabama residents are likely looking at roughly a 24.4% rate hike...assuming they stick with their current plans.
In other words: Shop around, shop around, shop around!
There's an old saying: Figures lie and liars figure. Statistics and percentages are a funny thing; as politicians of every stripe know, you can often twist them to mean whatever you like, especially when you don't provide proper (or sometimes any) context whatsoever. Case in point: Yesterday's embarrassingly dishonest "chart" presented by Representative Jason Chaffetz at the Planned Parenthood witchhunt committee hearing.
For a less inflamatory example of this, consider the headline of this entry:
Delaware: *Approved* 2016 rate hikes reduced by 11.4%!!
At first glance, of course, it looks like I'm saying that after going through the regulatory approval process, the individual health insurance premium rates in Delaware are being reduced by 11.4% next year! Hooray!
