Alaska is also a sparsely populated state with only two carriers on their individual market and four on their small group market. Alaska's insurance department website is useless when it comes to getting rate filings or enrollment data; I had to use the federal Rate Review site to even get the requested rate changes.
Fortunately, Premera Blue Cross includes a summary which lists their enrollment numbers, and with Moda being the only other carrier on the market, I was able to estimate a weighted average (assuming Moda only has around 2,200 enrollees, which seems about right given Alaska's total on-exchange enrollment of roughly 23,000 people).
However, the final/approved rate filings for 2023 are out now that we're into the Open Enrollment Period, and while Premera saw a slight reduction in their rate hike, Moda's are jumping from a 4% increase to a whopping 12.1%. Wow.
Alaska is also a sparsely populated state with only two carriers on their individual market and four on their small group market. Alaska's insurance department website is useless when it comes to getting rate filings or enrollment data; I had to use the federal Rate Review site to even get the requested rate changes.
Fortunately, Premera Blue Cross includes a summary which lists their enrollment numbers, and with Moda being the only other carrier on the market, I was able to estimate a weighted average (assuming Moda only has around 2,200 enrollees, which seems about right given Alaska's total on-exchange enrollment of roughly 23,000 people).
Average rate change for unsubsidized enrollees in 2022 will be an ugly 18.7% on the individual market...underscoring how vitally important it is that the American Rescue Plan subsidies be extended (preferably permanently).
On the small group market, the unweighted average increase is 4.8%.
As I noted last night, thanks to the federal Rate Review website finally being updated to include the final, approved 2022 rates for both the individual and small group markets in all 50 states (+DC), I've been able to fill in the missing data for my annual ACA Rate Change Project.
As I note there, the overall weighted average looks like it'll be roughly +3.5% nationally.
Normally I write up a separate entry for both the preliminary and approved rate changes in each individual state, but it seems like overkill to create 14 separate entries at once. Besides, in many of these states there's been few if any changes between the preliminary and approved rate changes.
Like Wyoming, Alaska is also a sparsely populated state with only two carriers on their individual market and three (possibly four?) on their small group market. Also like Wyoming, Alaska's insurance department website is useless when it comes to getting rate filings or enrollment data; I had to use the federal Rate Review site to even get the requested rate changes.
Fortunately, Premera Blue Cross includes a summary which lists their enrollment numbers, and with Moda being the only other carrier on the market, I was able to estimate a weighted average (assuming Moda only has around 2,000 enrollees, which seems about right given Alaska's total on-exchange enrollment of roughly 18,000 people).
On the small group market, only three carriers are listed in the federal database; Premera Blue Cross isn't, which either means they're pulling out of the state's small biz market or they just haven't been added to the database yet.
Average rate change for unsubsidized enrollees in 2022 will be 10.6% on the individual market...except that almost every enrollee will qualify for financial subsidies this year. On the small group market, the unweighted average increase is 6.4%.
IMPORTANT UPDATE: It turns out I had Alaska's "boroughs" and "census areas" (not counties) completely botched in several ways. On top of having some names/populations wrong, it also turns out that one of the "census areas" doesn't even exist anymore...it was abolished and split into two new census areas.
The entire post and graphs below have been updated/corrected to reflect this.
UPDATE 6/03/21: I've updated the graphs and table below and am not using fully-vaccinated residents only in order to make Alaska consistent with every other state.
It's also worth noting that the CDC says around 2.9% of all fully vaccinated AK residents (7,900 people) have an unknown home borough/area.
Now that I've developed a standardized format/layout & methodology for tracking both state- and county-level COVID vaccination levels by partisan lean (which can also be easily applied to other variables like education level, median income, population density, ethnicity, etc), I've started moving beyond my home state of Michigan.
As I noted recently, I've relaunched my project from last fall to track Medicaid enrollment (both standard and expansion alike) on a monthly basis for every state dating back to the ACA being signed into law.
Over at Xpostfactoid, my colleague Andrew Sprung has been doing a great job of tracking ACA Medicaid expansion enrollment growth since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic this past February/March at the macro (national) level, by looking at around a dozen states which have monthly reports available. He puts the overall enrollment growth rate at 23.6% from February thorugh October 2020.
Instead of replicating his work, I decided to take a closer look at individual states. The graph below shows how many Alaskans have been actively enrolled in our Medicaid expansion program (Healthy Michigan) every month since it was launched in September 2015:
Unfortunately, Alaska's 2021 rate filings aren't available via the state insurance department website or the SERFF database, and the actuarial memos posted to the federal Rate Review database are heavily redacted, so I can't run a weighted average rate change for either the individual or small group market.
The unweighted average changes, however, are a 2.0% reduction on the indy market and a 1.9% reduction for small group plans.
Louisiana's 2020 Presidential primary was scheduled for April 4th, but the other day Democratic Governor John Bel Edwards and Republican Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin agreed to reschedule it for June 20th...which is actually later than the last previously-scheduled primary in the U.S. Virgin Islands on June 6th:
The presidential primary elections in Louisiana slated for April will be delayed by two months, the latest in a series of dramatic steps government leaders have taken to slow the spread of the new coronavirus.
Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin, Republican, and Gov. John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, both said Friday they would use a provision of state law that allows them to move any election in an emergency situation to delay the primary.
The presidential primary elections, initially scheduled for April 4th, will now be held June 20th. Ardoin said in a press conference he does not know of any other states that have moved elections because of the new coronavirus, or COVID-19.
When I ran the preliminary 2020 rate changes for unsubsidized ACA policies in Alaska back in August, it was pretty easy to do...there's only a single carrier offering ACA-compliant individual market policies for 2019, which means no weighting is required. Furthermore, Premera Blue Cross Blue Shield is basically keeping their rates flat for 2020 anyway.
Moda is re-entering the market for 2020, but there's no "rate change" for them since there's no base premiums to measure against year over year.
Anyway, CMS just posted the final, approved rate changes, and Premera's number is ever so slightly higher than it was: They went from a 0.05% reduction to...a 0.03% reduction.
