Missouri

The Missouri Insurance Dept. has posted their preliminary 2024 single risk pool filings for the individual and small group markets.

Not a whole lot stands out to me other than Cigna apparently dropping out of the states indy market and Humana pulling out of the small group market. Otherwise, neither market has rate changes which seem terribly surprising--they come to a weighted average increase of 4.3% for individual market plans and 6.6% for the small group market.

As always, these are subject to state regulatory review and approval.

Most of the time when another state extends postpartum Medicaid coverage from two months to a full year, as allowed for under the American Rescue Plan from two years ago, I simply cross-post the official press release from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.

This time, however, I have a heads up...it isn't official yet, but it looks like Missouri and Alaska are about to become the 33rd & 34th states to do so. Via David Lieb of the Associated Press:

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (AP) — Lower-income new mothers could gain a full year of Medicaid health-care coverage in Missouri under legislation given final approval Friday as part of a national push to improve maternal health.

Missouri

Missouri's insurance dept. has released the proposed 2022 rate filings for both the individual and small group markets. Overall, individual market carriers are requesting rate hikes of 11.1% on average, while the small group market carriers are asking for an average 11.8% increase.

It's worth noting that each market has a new entrant for 2022: UnitedHealthcare is joining the individual market while National Health Insurance is jumping into the off-exchange Small Group market.

UPDATE 11/03/22: Now that the 2023 Open Enrollment Period has officially launched, the Missouri Insurance Dept. has finally posted the final/approved rate changes. They've made some very minor tweaks to a few of the individual market filings, but that just brings the weighted average down around 0.1 points to 11% even.

The small group market filings were approved as is.

Rate Changes

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.

Missouri

Missouri's insurance dept. has released the proposed 2022 rate filings for both the individual and small group markets. Overall, individual market carriers are requesting rate hikes of 2.3% on average, while the small group market carriers are asking for an average 11.8% increase.

It's worth noting that each market has a new entrant for 2022: Aetna is joining the individual market while Cigna is jumping into the off-exchange Small Group market.

The differences in enrollment noted for some carriers is likely due to some product lines being discontinued--for instance, if Celtic drops premiums by 3.1% on most of their policies but discontinues some others entirely, those enrolled in the discontinued lines won't have any official rate change to their existing policies.

Yes on 2 (Missouri Medicaid Expansion)

August 2020:

We did it!

Missouri just voted #YesOn2 to expand Medicaid, and now, because of YOUR vote, over 230,000 hardworking people will have access to life-saving healthcare! pic.twitter.com/azHN0GJjEW

— YesOn2: Healthcare for Missouri (@YesOn2MO) August 5, 2020

March 2021:

Republican lawmakers blocked Medicaid expansion funding from reaching the Missouri House floor on Wednesday, posing a setback for the voter-approved plan to increase eligibility for the state health care program.

Missouri

August 2020:

We did it!

Missouri just voted #YesOn2 to expand Medicaid, and now, because of YOUR vote, over 230,000 hardworking people will have access to life-saving healthcare! pic.twitter.com/azHN0GJjEW

— YesOn2: Healthcare for Missouri (@YesOn2MO) August 5, 2020

March 2021:

Republican lawmakers blocked Medicaid expansion funding from reaching the Missouri House floor on Wednesday, posing a setback for the voter-approved plan to increase eligibility for the state health care program.

Missouri

UPDATED 7/01/21

As my regular readers know, a few weeks ago I dove head first into a 2-week project to graph out the COVID-19 vaccination levels per capita across all 3,100+ counties to see where things stood in all 50 states.

Given how insanely politicized the COVID pandemic has been due to the Trump Administration deliberately doing so right from the outset, I ran scatter plot graphs based on what percent of the popular vote was received in each county by Trump last November for every state.

Sure enough, I found a strong inverse correlation between the two in most states, and a weaker (but still significant) correlation in many others. Correlation does not equal causation, of course, and there are plenty of other factors involved in how rapidly a population gets vaccinated, but there's no denying that partisanship is pretty clearly a significant one.

My conclusions have now been further confirmed by David Leonhardt of the New York Times:

Red America’s Covid Problem

Missouri

I've once again 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.

For the various enrollment data, I'm using data from Medicaid.gov's Medicaid Enrollment Data Collected Through MBES reports. Unfortunately, they've only published enrollment data through December 2020. In most states I've been able to get more recent enrollment data from state websites and other sources. For 2021 Missouri data, I'm using estimates based on raw data from the Missouri Dept. of Social Services.

Missouri

 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.

Here's Missouri:

Note: The CDC lists ~207,000 Missouri residents (10.9% of the total fully vaccinated) whose county of residence is unknown.

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