Michigan: Health Alliance Plan & Priority Health drop PPOs

Priority Health and Health Alliance Plan (HAP) is joining the "HMO only" crowd here in Michigan:

Following announcements by for-profit commercial carriers Humana and United Healthcare, nonprofits Health Alliance Plan and Priority Health are notifying agents they are pulling all PPO plans for 2017 from the Michigan health insurance exchange, Crain's has learned.

HAP has already announced it is pulling eight Personal Alliance individual preferred provider plans for individuals from the exchange and four PPO plans in the open market next year. HAP will continue to offer HMO individual plans on and off the exchange.

"We believe that these (PPO) plans do not represent the best value for the consumer," said Mary Ann Tournoux, HAP's senior vice president and chief marketing officer, in a statement. "At this time of cost-consciousness, we believe our remaining plans are the most cost-effective and offer our members and consumers greater value for their hard-earned insurance dollar."

Priority is eliminating all eight of its PPO plans on the exchange, but will continue to offer 21 HMO and 20 POS plans, said Amy Larson Miller, manager of public relations for Priority Health.

That means Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan would be the only one left with PPO plans offered to serve 341,000 people who purchase subsidized insurance on the Obamacare marketplace.

I had actually already struck Priority Health's PPOs from the 2017 avg. rate hike project before today, but the HAP announcement is a new development. In addition, there's an updated listing of Michigan's various rate change requests available on the state's Dept. of Insurance & Financial Services website; it looks like several of the other carriers tweaked their requests. As a bonus, this form even lists the exact number of current enrollees who would be impacted...a Godsend to me for this project.

Updating all the numbers and removing the 10,000 exchange-based HAP PPOs from the renewal list gives the following...a slight lowering of the average requested hike from 17.2% to 16.6%: