Hmmm...last year Nebraska had 5 carriers offering individual policies, 2 of which were actually divisions of the same company (UnitedHealthcare). Since United is pulling out of Nebraska, this leaves only three companies...one of which is the mysterious "Freedom Life Insurance Co." which keeps popping up in numerous states as not having a single actual enrollee, and almost always asking for the exact same rate hike: 17.37%. What's up with that?
Anyway, Coventry (actually Aetna) appears to also be gone next year as well...or perhaps they simply haven't submitted their rate filings yet? I suspect the latter because Nebraska's total individual market was over 110,000 people as of 2014, and is likely up to over 130K this year (nearly 88,000 enrolled via the ACA exchange alone this year)...yet adding up the numbers from the official filings only totals around 30,000 people.
Back in mid-April, I posted the UnitedHealthcare State Dropout Odometer, which tracked exactly which of the 34 states which UnitedHealthcare is currently offering individual market policies in this year they'd drop out of for 2017. Instead of simply stating "we're sticking around in these states and dropping out of the rest", United decided to dole the pain out gradually, with states announcing their departure one by one over several weeks. For quite awhile, I knew that they were sticking around Nevada, New York and Virginia, with another half-dozen states in limbo status.
Today, according to the Chicago Tribune and the Minnesota Star Tribune, it looks like those three are it: They'll still be available in those 3 states, but are pulling out of the other 31 (including California, where they only have around 1,200 current enrollees via the exchange anyway). OK, that sucks, but we kind of knew about this already; it's old news for the most part.
North Carolina's individual market, which only had 5 carriers participating to begin with this year, suffered a double blow recently when both UnitedHealthcare (155,000 enrollees) and Humana (3,272 enrollees) announced that they were dropping out of the market entirely next year (Celtic is also leaving the state, but they have literally just 1 person enrolled state-wide anyway). Fortunately, nature abhors a vacuum, so Cigna Health & Life Insurance decided to join the exchange for 2017. Cigna is already selling off-exchange individual policies, but only has fewer than 1,300 people enrolled in them at the moment. There's also a carrier called "National Foundation Life Insurance" which is raising rates 17.4%...but doesn't have a single person enrolled at the moment anyway, so I'm not sure what to make of that.
It's time to take a breather from my ongoing 2017 Rate Hike Request project to check in on a couple of off-season enrollment numbers. First up is Minnesota. Here's how the QHP tally (cumulative, not currently effectuated) has gone since open enrollment ended in the Land of 10,000 Lakes (note: Michigan actually has 11,000, so there!):
OK, there's something very odd going on with Missouri's 2017 rate filings for the individual market. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, Missouri's entire individual market was around 344,000 people in 2014. While it's likely increased by around 25% since then, that would still only bring it up to around 430,000 people including both grandfathered and transitional enrollees, which sounds about right to me (290,000 enrolled via the ACA exchange, which would leave around 140,000 off-exchange).
And yet, when I plug in the official rate filings for Missouri's individual market for 2017, here's what it looks like:
Not much to say about the bluegrass state...taken together, the 6 carriers offering individual policies in Kentucky appear to be requesting an average rate hike of 23.8%, ranging from Aetna's single-digits for a few hundred people up to Golden Rule's stroke-inducing 65% hike. One thing to note is that KY's total individual market was around 163,000 people in 2015, and is likely around 25% higher today (around 203,000), so over half of the market is likely missing from this table:
With only 584,000 residents, Wyoming is the smallest state, with a population over 10% smaller than even the District of Columbia or Vermont. Last year there were only 2 insurance carriers offering individual policies on the ACA exchange, Blue Cross and WINhealth. The average rate increase for 2016 was right around 10% even.
WINhealth sent along this release saying: As of October 8, 2015, WINhealth has chosen not to participate in the individual market, to include the federal exchange, for the 2016 plan year. The decision not to participate stems from a recent announcement from the federal government regarding the risk corridor program .
Last year, the Texas ACA-compliant individual market carriers requested an average rate hike of around 16%, although it was a pretty fuzzy guesstimate since I couldn't track down the average rate hikes for about 25% of the market other than knowing that whatever it was, it was under 10%.
This year, the good news is that CMS has started postingall rate change requests whether over or under 10%, making it easier to fill in some of the data. The bad news is that 3 of the 19 carriers offering individual policies next year redacted any data giving a clue as to what their current enrollment numbers are: CHRISTUS, Community First and Oscar Insurance.
The other 16 carriers did provide those numbers pretty clearly (except for Sendero, which only gave a projection of "member months" which I had to divide by 12 to get a rough enrollment estimate).
