A year ago, rate filings caused widespread anxiety, as multiple carriers announced withdrawals from the ACA market, and state officials struggled to fill bare counties. Many of those remaining filed enormous rate increases. In 2018, marketplace enrollment was stable, while unsubsidized enrollment continued its multi-year decline. So far, this year’s rate filing season has been sprinkled with news of entry and expansion, and proposed rate hikes that are generally more moderate. With no announced market exits thus far, it seems likely that in 2019 there will be net entry into the ACA marketplace.
Over the weekend, CMS dropped a big bombshell on everyone: In response to a federal judge siding with a small insurance carrier in New Mexico in a lawsuit over the formula for the ACA's Risk Adjustment (RA) formula, the Trump Administration has decided not to transfer any RA funds for the 2017 calendar year to anyone until...well, I'm not sure exactly, but for the foreseeable future.
Pretty much expert on how the RA program (and the law) has indicated that this is completely unnecessary; there's several responses at CMS's disposal which wouldn't require throwing the entire industry into a panic (yet again). Regardless, this is where we're at.
OK, I wasn't expecting this at 10:40pm on a Friday night, but here you go...via Stephanie Armour and Anna Wilde Mathews of the Wall St. Journal:
Trump Administration Expected to Suspend ACA Program Related to Insurer Payments
The Trump administration is expected to suspend an Affordable Care Act program that plays a key role in the health law’s insurance markets, a move that could deal a financial blow to many insurers that expect payments.
The suspension of some payouts under the program, known as risk adjustment, could come in the wake of a recent decision by a federal judge in New Mexico, who ruled that part of its implementation was flawed and hadn’t been adequately justified by federal regulators, people familiar with the plans said.
A few days ago, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid released three important new reports on the 2018 Open Enrollment Period and trends in the individual market. There's a lot of data to go over, so I'm breaking my analysis into several smaller posts for easier readability.
Now we move onto the second report released by CMS this week: The "Subsidized/Unsubsidized Enrollment Trend Report". If you set aside the anti-ACA digs from the Trump Administration, there's some fascinating data to be found, including what they claim to be one of the Holy Grails of the ACA individual market: Supposedly accurate data on the number of off-exchange ACA-compliant enrollees across the first four years of the ACA exchanges! Yes, I know, it's exciting, heady stuff.
A few days ago, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid released three important new reports on the 2018 Open Enrollment Period and trends in the individual market. There's a lot of data to go over, so I'm breaking my analysis into several smaller posts for easier readability.
Next, let's take a look at the average unsubsidized monthly premiums and APTC subsidies in each year. I've already crunched all of these data before, but that was based on the QHP selctions from the 2017 and 2018 Open Enrollment Periods. The table below is more accurate since it reflects the actual average premiums and subsidy amounts for all of 2017 and for 2018 after subtracting out nearly all of those who never actually paid for their first month of coverage. The numbers for each state and nationally should be close but slightly different:
A few days ago, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid released three important new reports on the 2018 Open Enrollment Period and trends in the individual market. There's a lot of data to go over, so I'm breaking my analysis into several smaller posts for easier readability.
Whew! Georgia only has 4 carriers participating in the individual market, but tracking down some of the data was a royal pain in the butt, especially Ambetter/Centene, which not only buried the numbers I needed inside a whopping 1,900-page PDF file, but the actual average requested rate increase wasn't even included; for that I had to check a different file. Yeesh.
The good news is that carriers in Georgia are only requesting around a 6.1% average rate increase for ACA-compliant individual market policies next year.
The bad news is that if it weren't for the ACA's individual mandate being repealed and the Trump Administration's expansion of #ShortAssPlans, 2019 premiums would likely be dropping by around 5.8% instead.
NOTE: My broadband connection has been experiencing a lot of problems lately; I have a service guy on his way out today for the fourth time in the past two weeks, but this means I'll likely be offline for a few hours, so this post will be incomplete for awhile.
Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Releases Reports on the Performance of the Exchanges and Individual Health Insurance Market
Reports show individual market erosion and increasing taxpayer liability
Um...yeah, deliberately sabotaging the ACA a dozen different ways and cutting off CSR reimbursement payments, thus forcing the carriers to load CSR costs directly onto premiums, which in turn jacks up APTC subsidies accordingly, will have the effect of "increasing taxpayer liability"). Go on...
