Individual Market

Mark Farrah Associates just released their semi-quarterly overview of the individual health insurance market. Their data is among the best in the industry, but there's still several important caveats to keep in mind, including an important one which likely went public too late for them to include in their analysis.

According to Farrah's report:

Thanks to David Snow for the heads up!

A couple of weeks ago, both Louise Norris and I crunched the South Carolina data and came up with different estimates of the weighted average requested 2016 rate hikes for the ACA-compliant individual market. She used a worst-case scenario and estimated it to be around 16.8%; I took a slightly more optimistic approach and came up with 15.2%.

Well, the South Carolina Dept. of Insurance just released their approved 2016 rates, and they ended up pretty much splitting the difference.

As you can see, even though there are only 5 carriers operating on the ACA exchange and another 5 offering policies off-exchange only, the overall average is still 15.9% either way: