Arkansas 2026 rate filings just got even MORE confusing

In the most recent chapter of the ongoing 2026 Arkansas rate filing saga, I noted that both the total number of residents enrolled in ACA individual market policies as well as the average 2026 rate increases for the six insurance carriers participating in the individual market next year kept changing, often in ways which were contradictory with other numbers claimed within the same press releases:

You'll notice that in addition to the rate changes being updated (increasing from a weighted average hike of 26.2% to 35.7%), most of the current enrollee figures were also modified, although these only changed slightly in most cases. Overall the total number of current individual market enrollees statewide dropped a bit from ~354,000 to ~345,000.

Minor changes like this aren't unusual; sometimes the carriers make slight tweaks as more recent data comes in or clerical errors are corrected; other times they round off the enrollee totals (that doesn't seem to be the case here, however).

...Cut to a few weeks ago, when I reported that a local reporter, Benjamin Hardy, had used FOIA requests to acquire internal email correspondence within the AR Insurance Dept. & Commerce Dept. showing that the state plans on responding to the impending expiration of the enhanced ACA premium tax credits in a very positive way: By implementing a robust Premium Alignment policy to maximize the effectiveness of the remaining federal subsidies...

In my most recent post I gave full credit & praise where due to the Arkansas Insurance & Commerce Depts for doing this; maximized Premium Alignment (which includes but isn't limited to robust Silver Loading) is something I and other healthcare wonks have been pushing every state to do for several years now, and I'm glad to see that Arkansas is joining nearly a dozen other states in implementing this practice.

...HOWEVER, I also went on to note that some of the other language and claims being presented (again, internally only for now) within the Arkansas state agencies was either confusing, questionable or both.

The short version was that the Arkansas Insurance Dept. seemed to be completely ignoring the fate of around 80,000 current ACA exchange enrollees.

Then, AR Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders issued an incredibly confusing press release:

On Friday morning, Gov. Sarah Sanders said she had “secured average rate increases that are 35.8% lower than previously proposed” from BlueCross and Centene, the two insurance companies that sell plans on the Arkansas Health Insurance Marketplace. (The marketplace is how people who aren’t covered through an employer, family member, or Medicaid typically buy health insurance.)

...But that 35.8% price reduction she touted? That’s simply a comparison to the initial proposal from insurers back in August. What ultimately matters to Arkansas health insurance consumers is the price bump that remains: The average premium increase next year will still be more than 22%, according to a chart included in the governor’s statement.

...Muddying the waters further, there’s something peculiar about the numbers in the chart from Sanders’ office: The “initially proposed” increases aren’t the same figures as the ones released to the public in August by the Insurance Department.

...Both the governor’s office figures released Friday and the insurance department figures released in August are expressed in topline numbers for each of six carriers (all of which are owned by either Centene or Blue Cross). Five of the six numbers listed in the governor’s chart are different (higher or lower) than those released by the insurance department in August, sometimes dramatically so (one changed by 29 percentage points).

I went on to note that both the enrollment numbers and the supposedly revised rate hikes for each carrier didn't seem to make much sense, nor did they even match up with the verbiage in the Governors own press release. In two cases both figures identical to each other.

As Arkansas Times reporter Benjamin Hardy noted:

It’s unclear how the governor’s new numbers might have been calculated. The governor’s office has not responded to queries, so there is simply no way to know where the figures are coming from. Strangely, the governor’s press release referred to one eye-popping increase (54.2%) that was listed on the August insurance department release but not in the governor’s own figures. It’s a mystery.

...On top of this, take a look at this section of Sanders' press release:

The six health plans included in this announcement are managed by Centene and Arkansas Blue Cross Blue Shield and are available on the federally managed healthcare exchange established by the Affordable Care Act. They cover 308,662 Arkansans.

Well, there's been yet another confusing twist to all of this: The official Arkansas Insurance Dept. website has finally been updated yet again with new average rate increases (which do mostly match Huckabee Sanders' claims)...as well as new "Affected Lives" figures which don't match up with any of the prior numbers!

Given all the confusing numbers I've posted before, I've boiled it all down to the simplified tables below which illustrate the mess:

• Arkansas Dept. of Insurance website on 7/17/25
• Federal Rate Review website on 8/08/25
• AR Gov. Sanders press release on 9/19/25
• Arkansas Dept. of Insurance website on 10/03/25

Here's what the four look like side by side:

Again, the enrollment changes from the first to the second columns don't set off any alarms for me as the carriers often make slight tweaks to these when they resubmit their filings.

However, the additional ~11,000 reduction as of the Governor's press release on 9/19 does set off a red flag, especially given that the press release itself claims the total to be far lower still, at 308,662.

This is now followed up by the Arkansas Insurance Dept. now claiming there's even fewer enrollees than that, at just 307,166.

If so, this would be a greater than 13% drop in current enrollment for data which is (as I understand it) supposed to be locked in as of last March or April. That is, I'm pretty sure the actuaries are supposed to stick with their enrollment numbers from last spring even if they resubmit filings a few months later in the year.

Put another way: What the hell happened to the "missing" 46,703 enrollees??

The next part of this mystery is found in the second table: The carriers initially submitted filings for 2026 averaging over 26%...then, a month later, resubmitted dramatically higher average rate hikes of nearly 36%.

So far, this can be partially explained by the AR Insurance Dept's decision to go all in on robust Premium Alignment...except that this still doesn't make much sense since the Premium Alignment policy had been announced via an official bulletin sent out way back in early March. So unless they were shrugging it off or something, why wouldn't the carriers have included Premium Alignment in their inital filings?

Then, a couple of weeks ago, Gov. Sanders issues her press release boasting about somehow causing the final 2026 filings to plummet to just 22% (using enrollment numbers which duplicate each other and which manage to "lose" 11,000 enrollees)...and finally, today, the state insurance dept seems to have belatedly "caught up with" the Governor by updating their website to mostly match the weighted average rate hike her press release claimed...while simultaneously changing their enrollment count to be ~27,000 fewer than the press release table added up to and ~1,500 fewer than the precise number Sanders claims in the press release text.

ON TOP OF ALL OF THIS, I have to go back to the whole Premium Alignment (PA) thing: If the initial 26.2% average didn't include PA but the revised 35.7% average did, then what does it mean if the final weighted average is either 22.2% or 22.3% (depending on whether you go by Sanders' press release or today's AR DOI website)? That isn't just much lower than 35.7%, it's several points lower than the supposedly non-PA initial submission.

Does this mean that Arkansas is scrapping/reversing their own decision to go full-bore PA pricing after all? Or is something else going on here?

As I said before, there's often minor discrepancies within the annual rate filings both in terms of the rate change percentages as well as the estimated number of current enrollees for any of several reasons (sometimes they'll round the numbers off on one filing form but not another, for instance). Usually I take these in stride. But this years Arkansas situation has been all over the place in too many different ways for me to ignore it.

Again: I'm not accusing Sanders or anyone at the AR Insurance Dept. of doing anything nefarious here; I'm just confused as hell.

I guess we'll find out once Open Enrollment launches on November 1st at this point?

In any event, I'm not going to update my official Rate Change Project post for Arkansas until the dust settles on this weirdness.