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.
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.
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.
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
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 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
The ACA's language didn't account for the possibility that some states might not expand Medicaid, which is why the lower-end range of exchange plan subsidy eligibility starts off at 100% FPL...
Unfortunately, those earning less than 100% FPL are still stuck without any viable options besides either "going bare" and praying they don't get sick or injured or possibly buying a junk plan of some sort. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, there's around 2.2 million Americans still caught in the "Medicaid Gap", where they don't qualify for Medicaid but don't earn enough to be eligible for subsidized ACA exchange policies (Kaiser estimates another 1.8 million uninsured adults in these states in the 100 - 138% "overlap" cateogory, plus around 356,000 who are eligible for Medicaid but still haven't enrolled for one reason or another).
NOTE: This is an updated version of a post from a couple of months ago. Since then, there's been a MASSIVELY important development: The passage of the American Rescue Plan, which includes a dramatic upgrade in ACA subsidies for not only the millions of people already receiving them, but for millions more who didn't previously qualify for financial assistance.
Much has been written by myself and others (especially the Kaiser Family Foundation) about the fact that millions of uninsured Americans are eligible for ZERO PREMIUM Bronze ACA healthcare policies.
I say "Zero Premium" instead of "Free" because there's still deductibles and co-pays involved, although all ACA plans also include a long list of free preventative services from physicals and blood screenings to mammograms and immunizations with no deductible or co-pay involved.
