Insurance Commissioner Issues Decisions For 2020 Health Insurance Rates
Insurance Commissioner Andrew N. Mais today announced the Department has made final decisions on health insurance rate filings for the 2020 coverage year. As a result of these decisions, Connecticut consumers are projected to save approximately $54 million.
Back in early June, the Washington State Insurance Commissioner announced that preliminary rate filings for the ACA individual market in 2020 were averaging just 1.0% higher than this year. My own analysis brought the weighted average in at 1.4%, but whatever. The Small Group market requests also came in at an average increase of 6.7%.
With my big MLR Rebate project finally out of the way, I have a backlog of other write-ups, including several approved 2020 premium rate changes. First up is tiny Rhode Island.
As you may recall, back in July the Rhode Island insurance commissioner announced that the state was following New Jersey's model: They're reinstating the individual mandate penalty, and using the revenue from that to help fund their just-approved state reinsurance program to reduce unsubsidized premiums by 5-6 percentage points:
If approved, Rhode Island would have a $14.7 million reinsurance program for 2020 funded through the individual mandate penalty and federal pass-through funding. Rhode Island estimates a federal pass-through rate of 43 percent. Of the $14.7 million, the federal government would contribute less than half of the funds (about $6.4 million), and the state would contribute about $8.3 million.
Way back in October 2013, the very first official ACA Open Enrollment Period began...and was an immediate disaster for not just the federal exchange website (HealthCare.Gov), but also for about half of the states which were operating their own whole-widget ACA exchange websites.
That first year, there were 15 states doing so: California, Colorado, Connecticut, the District of Columbia (not actually a state, I know), Hawaii, Kentucky, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington State. There were oddball problems at launch with most of them, but HI, MD, MA, MN, NV, OR and VT had serious issues.
Governor Raimondo’s proposed FY 2020 budget called for the creation of the Health Insurance Market Integrity Fund, which would make available reinsurance payments to health plans to reduce the burden of high cost claims on individual market premiums. According to insurer filings, the enactment of the Health Insurance Market Integrity Fund would reduce the individual market premium requests from 6.6% to -0.4% for BCBSRI and from 5.4% to 1.7% for NHPRI. These insurers’ pricing assumptions are subject to review and verification by OHIC. Table 1 shows the requested individual market rate increases with and without reinsurance.
Since then, the Ohio Dept. of Insurance has reviewed and approved the rates for 2020, and while they don't provide much detail on individual carriers, overall it looks like they reduced rates slightly more (average reduction of 7.7%). The wording below is almost identical to what it was last month, except for the highlighted text:
TDCI Approves Carriers’ 2020 Rates on the Federally Facilitated Marketplace
More Choices, Rate Decrease Highlight Rating Filing Season
The Tennessee Department of Commerce and Insurance (TDCI) announces the approval of insurance rates requested by the five carriers offering coverage on the Federally Facilitated Marketplace (FFM) in 2020.
Overall individual rates increased an average of 9.0 percent and small group rates increased an average of 10.5 percent. In the individual market, CareFirst proposed an average increase of 7.7 percent for HMO plans, and 15.6 percent for PPO plans. Kaiser proposed an average increase of 5.0 percent. For small group plans, CareFirst filed average rate increases of 13.5 percent for HMO plans and 18.5 percent for the PPO plans. Kaiser small group rates proposed an average increase of 3.0 percent. Aetna filed for an average increase of 16.1 percent for HMO plans and 5.0 percent for PPO plans. Finally, United proposed an average increase of 13.0 percent and 7.4 percent for its two HMOs and 11.2 percent for its PPO plans.
