Last year individual market carriers here in my home state of Michigan only raised premiums 1.7% on average in 2019, with Oscar Insurance Co. being a new addition to the market. For 2020, they're reducing average premiums by about 2.0%. Oscar made very little headway in their debut year, only enrolling 649 people statewide.

On the surface, it looks like Michigan's total ACA-compliant individual market has plummeted by a whopping 18% (281K vs. 344K last year). However, this can be misleading because the enrollment numbers listed each year only include the number of enrollees actually impacted by the rate changes. For instance, if a carrier pulls out of half the state, then a chunk of their current total enrollment won't be listed since enrollees in that half aren't seeing their current premiums change...they'll be losing coverage altogether and will have to switch to a different carrier.

A couple of weeks ago I noted that Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards, a Democratic governor in a pretty red state, was trying to take whatever measures he could to provide ACA protections at the state level in case the insane federal "Texas Fold'em" lawsuit against the ACA ends up tearing down the entire law:

On Tuesday, May 21, Governor John Bel Edwards issued an executive order launching the Protecting Health Coverage in Louisiana Task Force after efforts to have protections offered to Louisianans with preexisting conditions repealed.

There's another Congressional healthcare hearing going on right now as well, this time in the House Energy & Commerce Committee; this one is on Surprise Billing:

HEARING ON “NO MORE SURPRISES: PROTECTING PATIENTS FROM SURPRISE MEDICAL BILLS”

The Subcommittee on Health of the Committee on Energy and Commerce will hold a legislative hearing on Wednesday, June 12, 2019, at 10 a.m. in the John D. Dingell Room, 2123 of the Rayburn House Office Building.  The hearing is entitled, “No More Surprises: Protecting Patients from Surprise Medical Bills.”  

Key Documents

Even as I'm typing this, there's an important hearing going on by the U.S. House Ways & Means Committee regarding pathways towards a universal healthcare coverage system.

Witnesses:

The New Mexico Office of the Superintendent of Insurance website just posted the preliminary 2020 insurance rate filings. Here's the full list, which includes a mish-mash of Individual Market, Large Group and Small Group Market policies, with a Pediatric Dental standalone plan thrown in as well.

It's worth noting that the NM carriers are being very careful to separate out on & off-exchange policies into separate listings even though they're all part of the same risk pool, and they're even separating out off-exchange "Mirrored" policies, which refers to CSR Silver Switching; this is a very good thing.

I've cleaned up the listings and plugged in the weighted average rate increases in the table below this one:

via Delaware Business Now:

Legislation calls for reinsurance program to aid people with extremely high health insurance premiums

Lawmakers have introduced legislation this week that would create a reinsurance program to help lower the cost of premiums for Delawareans who do not get insurance through their employers.

House Bill 176, which has no Republican co-sponsors, would stabilize the individual health insurance market and help Delawareans struggling with extremely highhealthcare costs to get relief, a release from House Democrats stated.

Last week I noted that Pennsylvania is joining Nevada, New Mexico, New Jersey and (apparently) Oregon in moving away from the federal ACA exchange mothership known as HealthCare.Gov:

Pennsylvania moves to take over health insurance exchange

Pennsylvania is moving to take over the online health insurance exchange that’s been operated by the federal government since 2014, saying it can cut health insurance costs for the hundreds of thousands who buy the individual Affordable Care Act policies.

...The bill is backed by Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, and his administration says it would make two important changes to reduce premiums for the 400,000 people who purchase health insurance through the Healthcare.gov online marketplace.

A week or so ago I reported that New Jersey is moving forward with fourteen bills related to protecting, repairing and improving the ACA at the state level...including several related to the state's transitioning to their own full state-based ACA exchange.

Today, Lilo Stainton of the New Jersey Spotlight reports that while things are proceeding smoothly for the most part, at least one of the bills is causing a few concerns:

Earlier today I noted that RateReview.HealthCare.Gov, which is a public-facing searchable database for annual health insurance policy premium rate changes, has gone through some updates on the ACA-Compliant side.

I also noted that the other section of the database, which tracks non-ACA compliant rate changes for "Transitional Plans" and "Student Plans", may have had some updates as well, but it's hard to say since I've poked around there so rarely. This morning I decided to rectify that by searching through the entire Transitional/Student plan database and compiling the results. Unlike the ACA side, there's no way of filtering it out by year, so the following table includes every rate change filing entry listed...and the results surprised me:

Warning: There's perhaps 100 people on the planet who'll have any interest in this post. Fortunately, most of those 100 people read this site regularly.

Every year, I spend months painstakingly tracking every insurance carrier rate filing for the following year to determine just how much average insurance policy premiums on the individual market are projected to increase or decrease. There are hundreds of insurance carriers nationally, with dozens of forms apiece, some of which follow no hard formatting guidelines, and most of which are revised at least once over the course of the spring, summer and fall before being locked in for the upcoming open enrollment period. It's a pretty imposing task.