OLYMPIA, Wash. –The Office of the Insurance Commissioner has approved 136 individual health plans from 12 insurers who will offer them to the Exchange, Wahealthplanfinder, for sale in 2016. The Washington Health Benefit Exchange Board is scheduled to certify the approved insurers and their plans at its board meeting later today.
The companies requested an average rate change of 5.4 percent, but 4.2 percent was approved.
Yes, I'm back. From what I can tell, the major Obamacare/health insurance-related stories while I was out were a) Scott Walker/Marco Rubio finally releasing their proposed "replacement plans" (such as they are) for the ACA, and b) the approved 2016 rate changes for ACA-compliant individual/small group policies across a whole mess of states (technically all 50 states +DC had to be finalized as of 2 days ago, but it'll still take awhile to dig up all of them, since many news stories & reports may leave out off-exchange plans, increases of less than 10% and/or actual market share for weighting purposes).
I'm ignoring the Walker/Rubio story for the moment, mainly because they're both complete jokes, but will write up something about that later. For now, let's dive into the approved 2016 rate change story, starting with Arkansas.
(ok, I actually have a general idea of the basics, and will be posting a bunch of stuff tomorrow, but feel free to fill me in in the comments in case I missed anything significant).
If some major development occurs I'll post it (and I'll probably be posting links to stuff via Twitter and Facebook here and there), but otherwise don't expect much in the way of site updates until next Thursday.
UPDATE: Yeah, yeah, I saw the news about both Rubio and Walker releasing their "Obamacare Replacement Plans". As far as I can tell, they're both the same warmed-over crap that the GOP has been farting around with for 5 years now, a mish-mash of "Obamacare without the Obama part", with "selling across state lines" added and "regulations requiring insurance companies not to act like complete jerkfaces" removed. I'll probably write up something about it when I get back next week, but that's my initial reaction.
When Attkisson posted her phantom numbers, one of the biggest ways she came up with her phony tally of how many people have gained healthcare coverage was to simply ignore Medicaid expansion completely. Apparently Medicaid "doesn't count" as healthcare coverage for some reason or another (or perhaps it's the other way around: To conservatives, anyone who qualifies for Medicaid apparently "doesn't count" as a human being). As a result, she was able to lop off about 6.1 million newly enrolled Medicaid recipients at the time (this is now up to perhaps 10 million newly covered out of the 14.5 million or so who've been added to the Medicaid rolls since the ACA was enacted).
Vermont was one of the earliest states to report their requested rate hikes back in mid-May. Due to Vermont's small size (both in total population as well as insurance providers...there's only two of them even operating on the individual markets), as well as their unique law requiring that all individual policies be purchased through the ACA exchange, they were also one of the easiest to calculate.
In addition, as far as I can tell, in Vermont, both the individual and small group markets are considered part of the same rate pool, although the market share differences between the two still resulted in slightly different weighted averages: 7.8% for the individual market, 8.1% for the small group market. These were slightly revised to 8.0% and 8.3% just prior to the review/approval process.
2015 Special Enrollment Period Report – February 23 – June 30, 2015
The next open enrollment period for Marketplace coverage begins on November 1, 2015 for coverage starting on January 1, 2016. Some people can sign up for health coverage outside of open enrollment, before November 1, because they qualify for a special enrollment period (SEP). A consumer can qualify for a SEP for such circumstances as loss of health coverage, losing Medicaid eligibility, changes in family status (for example, marriage or birth of a child), or other exceptional circumstances.
This snapshot provides information about consumers who selected a plan between February 23 and June 30, 2015 through the HealthCare.gov platform, which includes 37 states with Federally Facilitated Marketplaces, State Partnership Marketplaces, and supported State-Based Marketplaces.
Assuming my ballpark estimate of appx. 7,500 Off-Season QHP Selections Per Day is accurate, the grand total nationally should be breaking the 13 million milestone right about...now-ish (or at least sometime this week).
YES, I KNOW ABOUT THE BIG CMS OFF-SEASON QHP REPORT released a couple of hours ago, and I'll be posting about that next, but I just got back from an end-of-summer camp carnival thing with my kid, and want to make sure I get Massachusetts crossed off the list first.
The Massachusetts Health Connector just held their monthly board meeting this morning, and have released the July dashboard report with a whole mess of demographic data for Baystate-obsessed nerds to revel in.
I've pasted screen shots of every page of the report below (and there's a link to the PDF version above), but here's the main takeaways:
Effectuated QHPs have reached 170.5K...a whopping 45,161 higher than at the end of Open Enrollment!
While the national effectuation number is likely only 2% or so higher today than it was in March (likely 10.4 million vs. 10.2 million), in Massachusetts it's 36% higher. There's two main reasons for this, both connected to "ConnectorCare", which is unique to Massachusetts. ConnectorCare consists of the same low-end Qualified Health Plans that anyone can purchase (ie, they're still counted as QHPs in the national tally), except that in addition to the federal Advanced Premium Tax Credits (APTC), enrollees in ConnectorCare also receive additional state-based financial assistance, making them even more attractive to enrollees. In addition, however, unlike "normal" APTC or Full Price QHPs, which are limited to the official open enrollment period for most people, ConnectorCare enrollment, like Medicaid/CHIP, is open year round. That makes a dramatic difference, as you can see below; over 85% of the net QHP enrollment increase since March is thanks to ConnectorCare additions.
In addition, MA is the only state I know of which actively reports their attrition numbers--that is, so far this year they've had just 16,631 people drop their QHP policies, meaning a total of 187,194 people have selected a plan and paid at least their first monthly premium.
Assuming a 90% payment rate (confirmed for Massachusetts back in April), this also suggests that the cumulative QHP selection total should be roughly 208,000 people to date, which is only significant to me and The Graph.
But wait, there's more! Look below and you'll see a whole mess of pie charts, bar charts and line charts, breaking out everything from Metal Level selections and Market Share by Provider to SHOP enrollments (5,302 lives covered as of August 1st) and even Dental Plans!
