New CMS data, quietly released in late August, show about 178,000 consumers chose a qualified health plan (QHP) through a state or federal exchanges after losing Medicaid and CHIP coverage in the first two months of the Medicaid unwinding. Those sign-ups through the end of May are more than three times the 54,000 enrollments that CMS reported in July, which reflected only the April numbers.
West Virginia is yet another state where I'm unable to acquire unredacted actuarial memos and/or filing summaries in order to run weighted average rate changes, so I have to settle for unweighted averages. On the other hand, on the individual market, at least, WV only has three carriers and their requested rate changes for 2024 are in a very narrow range anyway (from flat to a 2.1% increase), so it doesn't matter much.
The good news is that West Virginia's individual market rates are only increasing by around 1% next year, one of the lowest avg. rate increases in the country.
The bad news is that West Virginia already has by far the highest unsubsidized individual market rates in the nation, at nearly $1,200 per month (second highest this year is Wyoming at $965/month).
In any event, small group market carriers are requesting an unweighted average increase of 9.6% overall.
UPDATE 11/08/23: State regulators increased the rate h ikes from 1.1% to 3.0% for CareSource, but otherwise left the other carriers on both markets as is.
User-friendly tool helps identify hospitals and health systems committed to providing high-quality maternity care
Today, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) will begin displaying the ‘Birthing-Friendly’ designation icon on CMS’s Care Compare online tool. CMS created the new designation to identify hospitals and health systems that participate in a statewide or national perinatal quality improvement collaborative program and that implement evidence-based care to improve maternal health.
As always, the Texas individual and small group markets are pretty messy. For starters, they have up to 20 individual market carriers depending on the year, along with over a dozen small group market carriers some years.
On top of that, as is also the case in some other states, some of the names of the insurance carriers can be confusing as hell. There's the "Insurance company of Scott & White" which seems to have changed its name to "Baylor Scott & White Insurance Co.," which isn't to be confused with "Scott & White Health Plans" and so on.
In addition, this year there seem to be a lot of carriers bailing on the Texas market altogether: Ambetter, Ascension and FirstCare appear to be pulling out of the states individual market, while Aetna (up to four different divisions?) along with Humana are leaving the small group market.
Every month for years now, the Centers for Medicare & Medicare Services (CMS) has published a monthly press release with a breakout of total Medicare, Medicaid & CHIP enrollment; the most recent one was posted in late February, and ran through November 2022.
Wisconsin has the most competitive ACA markets in the country, at least in terms of the sheer number of insurance carriers offering policies on both the individual (14) and small group (18) markets. They're losing two carriers in 2024 (WPS Health Plan in both markets and Humana in the small group market only), but it's still pretty robust.
The bad news is that it's once again extremely difficult to acquire Wisconsin's actual rate filings prior to the actual Open Enrollment Period launching, meaning I can only run unweighted average requested rate increases/decreases.
With that in mind, individual market carriers are requesting unweighted increases of around 6.8% (ranging from 1% - 15.7%), while small group carriers are seeking hikes of around 7% overall, ranging from a 25.9% reduction (wow!) to a 16.3% increase.
UPDATE 11/08/23: No changes to any of the individual market rate requests; a couple of slight changes to the small group carriers.
The bad news for Wyoming residents who earn too much to qualify for any federal ACA subsidies is that the state has the second highest unsubsidized premiums in the country after West Virginia. The good news is that, thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act, there are far more residents who do qualify for federal subsidies, which chop those premiums down to no more than 8.5% of their income.
The other good news for them is that for 2024, average premiums across the two insurance carriers which participate on the ACA exchange pretty much cancel each other out, with Blue Cross Blue Shield of Wyoming dropping their average premiums by 7% even as the Montana Health Co-Op seeks to raise theirs by 7.6%. Unfortunately, once again, I've been unable to get ahold of enrollment data for each carrier so this is an unweighted average only; if, say, 90% of enrollees are in Montana Co-Op plans, the weighted average would obviously be more like a 6% increase or whatever.
Pretty straightforward in the Mount Rushmore state. Three carriers on the individual market; around 48,000 enrollees total; requested rate changes ranging from a slight drop to a 5.9% increase. The weighted average across all three is +2.5%. No one new seems to be entering the market and none of the current ones are pulling out.
For the small group market, there are six carriers (again, no one new, no one dropping). The requested rate increases for these range from 2.5% to 10.3%, with a weighted average increase of 5.2% statewide.
Update 11/08/23:No changes to any of the preliminary filings on either market.
Nebraska doesn't even bother listing indy/small group plan rate filings on their own insurance department website...the link goes directly to the federal Rate Review database. The problem with this is that very few filings here are unredacted, which means it's difficult to acquire the policy enrollees for many carriers needed to run a weighted average.
Nebraska has 4 carriers on the individual market for 2024: BCBS, Medica, NE Total Care and Oscar Health. The unweighted average rate increase being requested is around 2.9%.
I also don't have the enrollment for any of the 4 Small Group market carriers. It also looks like Aetna is pulling out of the NE sm. group market, but it might just be that the federal database doesn't have them listed yet The unweighted average rate change being requested there is a 7.9% increase.
UPDATE 11/07/23: No changes were made to the preliminary rate filings for the individual market; for the small group market, Blue Cross Blue Shield had their requested increase shaved down by about 1.7 points.
This one is particularly frustrating. In addition to the filings being listed at the federal Rate Review website, every individual & small group market carrier also has their filings listed via the SERFF databaseand via New Mexico's own internal, searchable rate filing database...and yet I still can't run a weighted average rate change for either market because almost none of the filings at any of these three databases includes the actual enrollment data (Presbyterian on the individual market is the exception).
As a result, I have to once again settle for unweighted averages, which come to +5.6% on the individual market and +7.7% for small group plans.
UPDATED 11/07/23: In the end there were only slight tweaks made to a few carrier requests in either market.
