2027 Rate Changes - Florida: +15.3% indy market (unweighted); +11.4% sm. group market (unweighted)

ACA exchange enrollment has dropped by more than 10% in Florida since Congressional Republicans allowed the enhanced federal subsidies to expire at the end of last year.

Initial signups during Open Enrollment were only down 4% vs. OEP 2025...but effectuated enrollment was 7.7% lower year over year in January, rising to 10.3% lower as of February.

That's over 440,000 Floridians who already lost healthcare coverage in just the first two months of the year...a number which has likely continued to climb since then.

Here's what this looks like visually, with both 2025 and 2019 (the last pre-COVID year, which didn't include the enhanced subsidies) included for comparison:

Looking ahead to 2027, the preliminary rate filings for both the individual and small group markets are now available via the federal Rate Review database.

UNFORTUNATELY, due to what seems to be Florida law having an absurdly wide legal definition of "Trade Secret Protection," every insurance carrier's actuarial memo is heavily redacted...meaning that I don't have any idea of how many people are actually enrolled via any of the specific carriers, which in turn means having no idea what the weighted average rate increase is in 2027 for the Florida individual (or small group) market.

In case you think I'm overstating things, this is what the Florida Office of Insurance Regulation filing database search results look like when I try searching for the 2027 rate filings...it literally includes a "TRADE SECRET!" graphic overlaying most of the forms (and the ones it doesn't aren't useful to me for this purpose anyway).

As a result, the best I can do is to run a simple unweighted average, which comes to 15.3% for the individual market, although it ranges from as low as 3.9% for Centene Venture Company to as high as a stunning 39.1% for AmeriHealth Caritas.

It's also important to note that five different insurance carriers participating in Florida's individual market this year are leaving in 2027:

• Cigna Health & Life
• Cigna HMO
• Community Care Network
• Molina Healthcare of FL
• Sunshine State Health Plan (Although it appears that they'll transition enrollees over to Ambetter if they don't choose another carrier; Sunshine is a subsidiary of Ambetter, which is also known as Centene and Celtic, if things weren't confusing enough...)

Not only don't I know what the enrollment is for any of the individual carriers, I also don't know what the total individual market size looks like in Florida either, although if I assume around 10% of it is off-exchange that would put it at roughly 4.28 million people as of early 2026.

Similarly, Florida's small group market is also losing two more carriers (Florida Health Care Plan and National Health Insurance Co), with the remaining eight carriers seeking an unweighted average rate increase of 11.4%, ranging from 8.4% to 15.5%.