via the Maryland Insurance Administration:

Aetna CVS Health will join Maryland Health Exchange individual market in 2024

BALTIMORE – Aetna, a CVS Health company, has filed to offer its Aetna CVS Health individual health plans through Maryland Health Connection in 2024, giving consumers across Maryland another option for health coverage through the state-maintained marketplace.

“This is great news for the individuals and families who choose their health insurance coverage through the Maryland Health Connection marketplace,” said Governor Wes Moore. “It is vitally important for consumers to have choices to select the best plan for their needs. Maryland continues to be a national leader in maintaining a robust, affordable marketplace.”

Currently, three insurers – CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield, Kaiser Permanente and UnitedHealthcare – offer individual market health plans through Maryland Health Connection.

Over at Inside Health Policy, Dorothy Mills-Gregg has decided to check in on "Georgia Pathways," the Peach State's new program which partially expands Medicaid to residents earning up to 100% of the Federal Poverty Level (FPL), but with a rather significant string attached: Work reporting requirements:

As noted by Madeline Guth of the Kaiser Family Foundation last year:

...in spite of nearly every state which tried to (or succeeded in) implement Medicaid work requirements having their programs shut down by the courts, one state's work/reporting managed to survive: Georgia. As explained in the Kaiser article:

via the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS):

CMS Approves Added Benefits to Essential Health Benefits (EHB) Benchmark Plans in North Dakota and Virginia

September 6: CMS approved added benefits to the Essential Health Benefits (EHB) benchmark plans for North Dakota and Virginia for the 2025 plan year. The Affordable Care Act requires non-grandfathered health plans in the individual and small group markets to cover essential health benefits (EHB), which include items and services in ten benefit categories. For plan year 2020 and after, the Final 2019 HHS Notice of Benefits and Payment Parameters provides states with greater flexibility by establishing new standards for states to update their EHB-benchmark plans, and for tailoring them to fit the health care needs of their states.

Here's the best summaries I could find of the additional benefits for each state:

North Dakota:

via the U.S. Food & Drug Administration:

FDA Takes Action on Updated mRNA COVID-19 Vaccines to Better Protect Against Currently Circulating Variants

Today, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration took action approving and authorizing for emergency use updated COVID-19 vaccines formulated to more closely target currently circulating variants and to provide better protection against serious consequences of COVID-19, including hospitalization and death. Today’s actions relate to updated mRNA vaccines for 2023-2024 manufactured by ModernaTX Inc. and Pfizer Inc. Consistent with the totality of the evidence and input from the FDA’s expert advisors, these vaccines have been updated to include a monovalent (single) component that corresponds to the Omicron variant XBB.1.5.

What You Need to Know

via Pennie (Pennsylvania's ACA exchange):

Pennie, Pennsylvania’s official health insurance marketplace, is proud to present their inaugural Health Equity Data Report.

Pennie was created with the promise of providing quality and accessible health coverage to all Pennsylvanians. Since its inception, Pennie has implemented several initiatives to expand access to health coverage through the marketplace, including through record levels of financial help and reducing language access barriers. The data included in this report, as explained in detail throughout, support several key takeaways that establishes not only the current status of health equity in Pennsylvania, but also the additional steps necessary to reduce health inequities.

This report:

Last Tuesday I noted that a package of bills designed to codify various ACA protections into state law here in Michigan (most of which are low-hanging fruit of my own healthcare wish list which I posted back in February) had managed to make it halfway through the legislative process: Five of them have passed the Michigan House, but not the Senate; the other three have passed the Michigan Senate...but not the House. I applauded the state legislature for pushing these bills halfway through and encouraged them to get the other half of the job done.

I was therefore highly amused and pleased to see MI Governor Gretchen Whitmer call for doing that the very next day in her "What's Next" address:

via the Connecticut Insurance Dept:

CONNECTICUT INSURANCE COMMISSIONER ANNOUNCES 2024 HEALTH INSURANCE RATES SAVING ACA HEALTH INSURANCE PLAN MEMBERS $96.2 MILLION AND HOLDING INSURER PROFITS TO 0.75%

(Hartford, CT) – In a significant move to protect Connecticut consumers against unsupported health insurance cost increases, Connecticut Insurance Commissioner Andrew N. Mais announced today that the Connecticut Insurance Department (CID) continues to protect consumers by reducing health insurers’ 2024 requested rates, despite ongoing increases in underlying health care costs. These 2024 rates are for individual and small group plans offered on and off the state exchange Access Health CT. The Connecticut Insurance Department does not regulate self-funded plans which fall under the authority of the U.S. Department of Labor.

Over at KFF (previously the Kaiser Family Foundation), researchers/analysts Jared Ortaliza, Krutika Amin & Cynthia Cox have put together a new analysis of the overall individual (aka non-group) U.S. health insurance market as of early 2023. While ACA exchange-based enrollment is publicly available (for both subsidized & unsubsidized enrollees) and is the primary focus of this website, off-exchange enrollment is always somewhat fuzzier for several reasons:

Over at Inside Health Policy, Amy Lotven has an excellent scoop from a new CMS report which was hiding in plain sight:

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.

A few weeks ago, I noted that Virginia's average 2023 unsubsidized ACA individual market premiums dropped by nearly 13% thanks to the newly-implemented state-based reinsurance program...but that they were at risk of skyrocketing by as much as 25% in 2024 due to that same reinsurance program being at risk of not continuing for a second year because of a budget standoff:

During 2021, the Virginia General Assembly passed HB 2332, the Commonwealth Health Reinsurance Program, which was signed into law on March 31, 2021 as Chapter 480, of the 2021 Virginia Acts of Assembly. This bill requires the State Corporation Commission to submit a waiver request for federal approval to establish a reinsurance program beginning January 1, 2023.