The Rate Review database at Healthcare.Gov is a very useful tool for any insurance company requesting rate increases above 10%, but it's completely useless for requests below 10%. As such, I have hard data on the requested increases for about 600,000 Florida residents:
If Florida's entire ACA-compliant individual market was only 600K people, that would be the end of the story.
However, Florida actually has 16 different insurance companies selling individual policies...and the other 9 are all asking for lower than 10% hikes. After poking around the Florida Office of Insurance Regulation website as well as contacting the department directly, I've been able to pull together covered lives data for all 16, and requested rate change data for 3 more of them...2 of which are actually requesting rate decreases. When I add those 3 companies into the mix, the picture changes like so:
The Office of the Inspector General released a big report today which confirms what most healthcare/ACA observers have known for awhile now: The CO-OP organizations established by the ACA across 2 dozen states to help increase competition and keep the private, for-profit insurance companies (somewhat) honest...haven't been doing very well overall.
A judge has blasted a California software giant's claim that a cabal of campaign advisers are to blame for the decision to tank the state's $300 million Cover Oregon website project.
Oracle in February sued five campaign advisers and consultants to former Gov. John Kitzhaber, who resigned in February. Oracle argued the exchange was ready to roll out in February 2014, but said advisers led by Patricia McCaig pulled the plug on the project for political reasons.
On Monday, Multnomah Circuit Court Judge Henry Kantor issued a written opinion ripping Oracle's legal arguments using language that went far beyond his earlier e-mailed notice of the decision. He called Oracle's arguments "totally unsupported by the evidence provided."
Assuming my ballpark estimate of appx. 7,500Off-Season QHP Selections Per Day is accurate, the grand total nationally should be breaking the 13 million milestone right about...now-ish (or at least sometime this week).
I should note that thanks to this morning's New York update, the confirmed total has now officially broken the 12.1 million mark. The other 900,000 or so haven't been reported yet, and are mostly via Healthcare.Gov, of course.
Our growth continues to be balanced so far in 2015 as we added 571,000 Medicaid members, 331,000 national members, 51,000 individual members and 16,000 local group members. As a reminder, we closed on the Simply Healthcare acquisition in February of this year, which contributed 209,000 members. These results have been supported by strong operating cash flow of $2.8 billion year-to-date, which represents 1.6 times net income.
Humana Group is one of the largest health insurance companies in the country. As such, their enrollment data being made available is extremely helpful in seeing where things stand and how they've changed nationally.
Today, Bob Herman of Modern Healthcare provided me with a link to Humana's latest SEC filing. In addition to a whole mess of financial info which is of little interest to me, there's also all sorts of year-over-year data about their enrollment numbers...including a very handy section about their individual market, broken out by ACA exchange-based, Off Exchange and even their non-ACA compliant enrollments (ie, "grandfathered" and/or "transitional" enrollees).
Unfortunately, the data gets cut off as of 2/28/15, so this doesn't give any insight into the attrition rate since then (or a precise count of how many additional people enrolled during the #ACATaxTime special enrollment period which followed). However, it does give a lot of detailed analysis of the open enrollment period numbers, and does tack on an extra week's worth of private enrollments & 2 week's worth of CH+/Medicaid numbers (the official HHS report only ran through 2/21 for New York and the last press release with CH+/Medicaid numbers was as of 2/15).
As a result, the official numbers are slightly higher than what I had until now across the board:
A team of actuaries at the Minnesota Department of Commerce are currently scrutinizing the proposed rates that have been filed for 2016, and final rates will be announced on October 1. But for now, four MNsure’s individual market carriers have proposed the following rate changes for coverage effective January 1, 2016 (market share is as of the end of the 2015 open enrollment period):
