Arkansas

This is a minor update, but with all the bad rate hike news this year, I'll take any good news I can get. A couple of weeks ago, the Arkansas Insurance Dept. approved rate hikes for the 4 carriers participating in the ACA exchange next year, including significant reductions for all of them:

Now it looks like the final rate increases have been chopped down still more:

In mid-August, all of the carriers that offer plans in the Arkansas exchange proposed new rate increases for 2017, all of which were lower than their initially filed rates. Rate increases were then reduced even further for QualChoice and QCA:

Lots of stuff happening fast & furious these days as #OE4 approaches. Instead of individual posts, I'm gonna cram 7 state updates into a single one...and am also cheating a bit by cribbing off of excellent work by Louise Norris over at healthinsurance.org (which is fair, since she also gets some of her data from me as well):

ALABAMA: Here's what my requested rate hike table looked like for Alabama on August 1st:

Updates: Norris Confirms that:

There are a few states which have technically expanded Medicaid under the ACA, but have done so using an approved waiver which allows them to actually enroll expansion-eligible residents in private Qualified Health Policies (QHPs)...using public Medicaid funding to do so. To be honest, this has always struck me as being essentially no different than someone simply receiving 99.9% APTC/CSR subsidies for enrolling in an exchange policy anyway; it's just a question of which pool of federal funds the subsidies come from. The two states which I know for a fact do it this way are Arkansas and New Hampshire, with Arkansas calling their "Private Medicaid Option" program the "Health Care Independence Program".

In any event, AR "Private Option" enrollees may be categorized as "Medicaid expansion" in the official reports, but for purposes of estimating the risk pool, they're included in with every other ACA-compliant private individual policies, whether on or off the ACA exchange.

So just last Friday I posted the weighted average requested rate hikes for the Arkansas individual market; it came in at 14.9% overall, which is actually one of the lower statewide averages this year. As a reminder, here's what how the breakout looks:

OK, so 3 major carriers asking to jack up rates 15-24%, plus one at 8.5% and two others with just 7 enrollees between them (one of which is, once again, Freedom Life Insurance). So what?

Arkansas was a little weird...while the rate filings for 5 carriers are listed over at RateReview.HealthCare.Gov, the carrier with the largest individual market share in the state, BCBS (aka "USAble Mutual") is nowhere to be seen (there's a sm. group listing for them, but not individual). However, when I went directly to the AR SERFF database, there they were--and it's listed specifically as "2017 Individual QHP Rates", so there's no question here about whether they plan on offering ACA-compliant policies in 2017.

Anyway, between the HC.gov site and the SERFF site I was able to cobble together pretty much all of Arkansas' indy market. The numbers seem about right; AR's indy market was around 303K in 2014; while it's likely up to 375K or so today, the "missing" 70K can easily be attributed to UnitedHealthcare dropping out and/or grandfathered/transitional enrollees.

At 14.9% on average, this is actually good news for 2017, relatively speaking.

Over the past week or so, UnitedHealthcare started making good on their threat last fall to drop out of the ACA exchanges in at least some of the 33 states that they offer individual market policies in. On April 8th they said they were pulling up stakes in Arkansas and Georgia (although they're keeping a small presence in Atlanta via their experimental "Harken Health" division). Then, last Friday, they said they were dropping off the Michigan exchange as well...and just today, Adam Cancryn noted that they're pulling the plug on Oklahoma, while Zachary Tracer says they're pulling out of Louisiana. Ugh.

Thanks to Sabrina Corlette for the heads up:

UnitedHealth Group will stop offering plans on Arkansas' health insurance exchange next year, a spokesman for the Arkansas Insurance Department said Thursday.

The Minnetonka, Minn.-based insurer offered plans this year for the first time, but it didn't submit plans to the department for 2017, department spokesman Ryan James said.

The deadline for insurers to submit such plans was April 1, he said.

This is hardly unexpected news for a couple of reasons. First, UHC made huge waves last November by making a big, dramatic announcement that they might very well drop out of the ACA exchanges altogether next year after taking large losses on exchange enrollees in 2015. As you may recall, this was a very oddly-timed announcement given that they had issued a glowing quarterly report just a month earlier which made it sound like everything was hunky-dory.

This is a huge story which I should have been following, but a) I was on vacation the past couple of weeks, b) I can't cover everything healthcare-related, and c) it's really not directly related to the Affordable Care Act. Fortunately, the Arkansas Times' David Ramsey has been all over it, so I'll let him lay it out for you:

...all three members of the household were among almost 36,000 Arkansans who were kicked off of their health coverage on July 31. Insurance for another 13,000 people across the state will terminate at the end of this month. The cancellations are the result of a statewide sweep of Medicaid performed by the Arkansas Department of Human Services in an attempt to weed out those beneficiaries whose incomes are too high.

Last week I estimated the overall weighted average rate increases for the Arkansas individual market at "between 4-5%", with a rough estimate of around 4.6%.

Today, Arkansas Times reporter David Ramsey has provided the exact market share numbers for Arkansas. When I plug these in, the weighted average comes in a bit higher, at 4.98%:

HOWEVER, according to Ramsey, the Arkansas Insurance Division says that the actual weighted average is only 4.4% overall.

There could be any number of reasons for the discrepancy; it's possible that there's a few additional minor off-exchange carriers who I've missed, or there could be rounding errors/etc. In any event, these are all just estimates anyway, so I'll go with AID's official 4.4% figure.