2027 Rate Changes - Georgia: +20.7% individual market (unsubsidized) (FINAL)

Originally posted 7/13/26

Hoo boy. Via the Georgia Insurance Dept., I've acquired the preliminary 2027 individual market rate filings for Georgia insurers, and it's not pretty.

Unfortunately, all of the actuarial memos are pretty heavily redacted so I don't have a lot of useful details to post, but the bottom line is:

• Cigna is dropping out of the GA market; they announced they were pulling out of the entire individual market nationally earlier this year. I don't know how many Georgians are enrolled in Cigna plans at the moment, but it was around 35,000 as of a spring 2025.

• Peach State Health Plan (by Centene) also appears to be dropping out of the GA market, although they were always just a subsidiary of Ambetter of Peach State anyway. This gets a bit confusing since they also appear to be merging with "WellCare" so I'm not entirely sure what the situation is. In any event, they only had around 3,000 enrollees as of spring 2025.

• One carrier is newly entering the Georgia individual market, however: Antidote Health of GA.

Beyond that, as I said, it's a pretty ugly state of affairs. In 2025, over 1.5 million Georgians signed up for ACA plans during Open Enrollment, with an average of around 1.3 million actually enrolled in coverage per month. This year, only ~1.3 million signed up to begin with, actual enrollment was below 1.2 million by February, and it had reportedly dropped to around 950,000 as of April.

The actual rate filings suggest it may be even worse than that: They only total around 920,000 people as of March/April 2026 including off-exchange enrollment...possibly breaking 950,000 if you assume that both Cigna and Peach State's enrollees were still as high as they had been a year earlier, which is unlikely.

In any event, the insurance carriers participating next year are requesting full price average rate increases ranging from 16.9% (BCBS of GA) to as high as a stunning 54.3% (UnitedHealthcare)...with a weighted average around 20.7% higher than the current premiums are.

If approved as is, this would amount to unsubsidized enrollees paying another $1,925/year apiece on in premiums alone on average on top of the massive hikes they're seeing this year.

UPDATE 9/25/26: The final, approved 2027 rate filings have been published for Georgia in the SERFF database, and while some of the final rates for specific carriers have changed dramatically, these changes appear to have pretty much canceled each other out...resulting in an overall, weighted average rate increase just a tenth of a point higher than the preliminary filings, or 20.7%:

It's also worth noting that the Alliant filing had a slightly lower enrollment figure than the initial one did, and the Cigna withdrawal letter to the GA insurance commissioner included the actual effectuated enrollment figure, which is lower than I had previously thought.

Meanwhile, Georgia's total effectuated ACA exchange enrollment, which was already down over 12% year over year during Open Enrollment, has continued to plummet since the Open Enrollment Period ended: It was down 28% y/y to just ~950,000 people as of April, and was down another ~50,000 to just ~900,000 enrollees as of August...nearly 1/3 fewer Georgians enrolled year over year.

That's over 430,000 fewer Georgians with ACA exchange coverage so far this year than last...a drop of 457,000 since January 2025.

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