Democrats in the Wisconsin Legislature are pushing a bill designed to prevent large increases in health insurance rates, but it’s doubtful Republicans who hold a majority and control the legislative agenda will get behind it.
The bill would require insurance companies give consumers 60 days’ notice for rate increases and require the state Office of the Commissioner of Insurance to hold public hearings on rate increases of more than 10 percent.
Over a year and half into Medicaid expansion and the launch of Kynect, the state’s health insurance exchange program, Kentucky is among the nation’s leaders in reducing its uninsured population.
As a result of providing more services to more people throughout the commonwealth, however, Kentucky hospitals are reporting healthy improvement in their revenues.
I want to get a couple of things straight right off the bat:
Yes, I wholeheartedly support single-payer healthcare...and in fact, the longer I track the ACA and the more I learn about the healthcare/health insurance system in America as a whole, the more certain I am that moving to single payer would make far more sense than the crazy-complex system we have today.
I agree with Bernie Sanders on most other issues as well, but I'm still leaning towards Hillary Clinton at the moment (and I'd be perfectly fine with Joe Biden if he were to jump in as well).
Even so, I still believe that the ACA is a massive improvement over the previous system, and I find it unlikely that single payer would be likely to happen at the national level for at least a decade or more even if Sanders were to win and the Democrats were to retake both the Senate (likely) and the House (extremely unlikely).
With all that out of the way, Tuesday's Wall Street Journal published an absolutely absurd story which tries to make it sound as though a) Bernie Sanders has proposed a specific, detailed Single Payer universal healthcare plan which b) would cost $15 trillion over the next decade c) on top of existing healthcare spending.
In my latest exclusive for healthinsurance.org, I take a deeper look at all 17 (er, 16) Republican Presidential candidates and how they might fare if "forced" to enroll via the ACA exchanges as Ted Cruz falsely claimed he had to earlier this year.
Way back in May, the requested rate hikes on the individual market for our nation's capital appeared to average roughly 5.3%. Earlier today, the District of Columbia Dept. of Insurance, Securities & Banking (DISB) announced the approved rate changes for DC:
DISB announced Sept. 15 the approved health insurance plan rates for the District of Columbia’s health insurance marketplace, DC Health Link, for plan year 2016.
Eight carriers through four major insurance companies – Aetna, CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield, Kaiser Permanente and UnitedHealthcare – will have plan offerings for individuals, families and small businesses on DC Health Link when enrollment opens Nov. 1, 2015.
As we head into the final batch of states, it looks like the national weighted average rate increases, which had been hovering in the 11-12% range up until a week or so ago, are unfortunately starting to inch upwards, slammed by 20%+ averages out of South Dakota, Montana, West Virginia, Oklahoma and Utah. Lower average rate hikes out of Connecticut and Wyoming have also been announced, but the other 5 states more than cancelled those two out.
And now you can add Tennessee to the mix. Starting with Louise Norris' exchange-only data (which comes in at a 33% average hike), I've also plugged in additional off-exchange individual market numbers to come up with what looks like an overall average rate hike of around 28.3%:
Wyoming's total individual health insurance market in 2014 was just 27,000 people. While the total market likely increased somewhat this year, those gains are likely offset by perhaps 15% being either "grandfathered" or "transitional" policies.
Just over 18,000 were enrolled in effectuated exchange-based policies as of June 30 of this year, leaving perhaps 9,000 more enrolled in off-exchange plans.
According to Louise Norris of HealthInsurance.org, there's only two companies operating on the exchange in Wyoming this year: WINhealth Partners and BCBS of WY. WINhealth is asking for a 13.37% average rate hike; Blue Cross is asking for an uknown increase...except that it's under 10%.
Over at HealthInsurance.org, Louise Norris has done her usual excellent job of summarizing the enrollment/rate/exchange participation situation for another state, Utah. As she notes, in addition to the companies which operated on the Utah ACA exchange this year, one more "mystery" company is expected to join in 2016. Of course, Louise only focuses on the companies actually operating on the exchange, while I'm looking at the entire ACA-compliant individual market state-wide (because the risk pool includes off-exchange policies as well).
Fortunately, Utah has a fairly comprehensive rate review database with an easy-to-use lookup feature. Unfortunately, a few of the entries don't quite jibe with HHS's RateReview website. Most notably, the HHS site claims that Arches Mutual Insurance has 2 filings from the same date: One requesting a jaw-dropping 58% hike, the other for a slightly less-insane 46.65% increase, neither of which includes the actual number of covered lives:
While their reports have always been comprehensive, they were also a bit confusing. Thankfully, starting with their June report, they've made the appropriate data points a bit more obvious. While the QHP selection total is still confusing, the effectuated number (which is really more relevant at this point) is the combination of APTC/CSR + non-APTC/CSR enrollees, or 74,583 + 59,617 = 134,200 people as of the end of June.
"Benchmark" in this case refers to the plans which are used as the basis for the ACA's Advance Premium Tax Credit (APTC) formula. How much/little these particular rates change is even more important than the change in other policy rates, because these are the ones which the federal tax credit amounts are based on.
This is really important, because if the benchmark policy rate in your area changes, it can seriously impact how you receive in tax credits...even if nothing has changed at your end.
Back in July, after several revised rate hike requests, the overall weighted average rate hikes requested for the individual market in Connecticut had dropped twice: From 7.7% overall to 7.2%, and then again to just 5.2%, as individual insurance carriers reevaluated their numbers and estimates.
Today, Arielle Levin Becker reports that the final approved rate changes have been released, and the overall, weighted average hike has dropped even further:
Premiums for the 55,000 people who buy Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield health plans through the state's individual market will rise by an average of 2.4 percent next year, while ConnectiCare Insurance Company's 34,400 customers will see an average rate hike of 8.5 percent.
