In September 2018, the New Mexico Office of the Superintendent of Insurance (OSI) and Health Action NM (an advocacy group for universal access to health care) presented details about potential state actions to stabilize the individual market. OSI has the authority to regulate some aspects of the plans, including maximum duration, but they noted that legislation would be needed for other changes, including minimum loss ratios and benefit mandates.
New Mexico’s insurance regulations were amended, effective February 1, 2019, to define short-term plans as nonrenewable, and with terms of no more than three months. The regulations also prohibit insurers from selling a short-term plan to anyone who has had short-term coverage within the previous 12 months.
Last year I briefly attempted to keep track off the dozens of various state-based "ACA 2.0" protection/improvement bills flying around various state legislatures. I eventually abandoned this project since it became too difficult to keep up with, but I'm still reporting case studies as they come to my attention...and Louise Norris has just alerted me to some pretty big changes going into effect in Colorado this April.
First up: Short-term plans are being heavily neutered. In addition to being limited to 6 months per year (which is still longer than the Obama Administration's 3-month cut-off)...
Short-term plans will have to charge older adults no more than three times as much as they charge younger adults. Short-term plans are generally not available after a person is 64, but a quick check of plans currently available in Colorado show that some insurers are charging a 64-year-old up to seven times as much as a 21-year-old. That will have to stop as of April.
Last April, Maryland was one of several states which took action to counteract portions of the Trump Administration's attempts to sabotage the Affordable Care Act. In particular, Maryland (which has a Democratically-controlled state legislature but a moderate (by today's standards) Republican Governor) passed and signed into two important bills:
The combined effect of these changes was dramatic: Maryland's individual market insurance carriers, which had been planning on jacking up their average premiums by a whopping 30%, instead ended up lowering their 2019 premiums by over 13%. This is a net swing of around $3,200 per enrollee for the year (around $266 per month). In other words, instead of seeing unsubsidized 2019 premiums go up by $2,200 apiece, they dropped around $1,000.
Michigan was pretty much Ground Zero for the 2018 Blue Wave midterm elections. In addition to Democrats flipping the Governor's seat (and holding onto Debbie Stabenow's U.S. Senate seat), they also flipped the Attorney General, Secretary of State, one of two state Supreme Court seats, both of the stateBoard of Education seats which were up and all six state University Board seats which were up. In addition, they picked up two U.S. House seats, five state Senate seats and five state House seats.
It was a complete and utter repudiation of both Republican governance and their agenda.
As Democratic candidates prepare to take three statewide offices on Jan. 1 — governor, attorney general and secretary of state — Republican lawmakers introduced bills Thursday to challenge their authority.
A couple of weeks ago I noted that the Illinois state Senate unanimously overrode outgoing Governor Rauner's veto of their bill restricting the sale of non-ACA compliant short-term, limited duration healthcare plans.
Today, I'm happy to report that the state House has followed up and overrode the veto as well:
Breaking: Just got word that the Illinois legislature has overridden the veto on SB1737 which limits short term plans to 6 months and bans rescissions of short term plans. @GtownCHIR h/t @stephanibecker
Illinois Senate voted unanimously to override the Governor's veto of a bill to limit short-term health plans to 6 months. Protecting consumers and insurance markets from long-term short-term plans does not appear to be a partisan issue. https://t.co/fJ4NVV4LRQ
As I noted a few days ago, now that the 2019 ACA Open Enrollment Period is actually underway and the approved individual market premium rate changes have been posted publicly for every state, I'm finally able to go back and wrap up my 2019 Rate Hike Project for the nine states which I was still missing final numbers for.
As I further noted, the approved rates in most of those states didn't change much compared to the preliminary/requested rate changes I had already analyzed earlier this year:
I realize this may seem a bit late in the game seeing how the 2019 ACA Open Enrollment Period has already started, but I do like to be as complete and thorough as possible, and there were still 9 states missing final/approved premium rate change analyses as of yesterday which I wanted to check off my 2019 Rate Hike Project list.
Fortunately, RateReview.HealthCare.Gov has finally updated their database to include the approved rate changes for every state, which made it easy to take care of most of these.
Nebraska has a slightly confusing siutation, which is surprising since Medica is the only carrier offering ACA policies in the state, When I first took a look at the requested premium changes for 2019 back in August, it looked like the average was around 1.0%...that was based on splitting the difference between the 3.69% and -2.60% listings, since the filing form was redacted and I didn't know what the relative market split was between Medica's product lines.
I realize this may seem a bit late in the game seeing how the 2019 ACA Open Enrollment Period has already started, but I do like to be as complete and thorough as possible, and there were still 9 states missing final/approved premium rate change analyses as of yesterday which I wanted to check off my 2019 Rate Hike Project list.
Fortunately, RateReview.HealthCare.Gov has finally updated their database to include the approved rate changes for every state, which made it easy to take care of most of these.
However, while state insurance regulators left one of the three carriers offering individual market policies alone, they knocked the other two down substantially: CareSource was lowered from around 13.1% to 9.5%, while Highmark Blue Cross Blue Shield was lowered from an average of 15.9% to 9.0%.
I realize this may seem a bit late in the game seeing how the 2019 ACA Open Enrollment Period has already started, but I do like to be as complete and thorough as possible, and there were still 9 states missing final/approved premium rate change analyses as of yesterday which I wanted to check off my 2019 Rate Hike Project list.
Fortunately, RateReview.HealthCare.Gov has finally updated their database to include the approved rate changes for every state, which made it easy to take care of most of these. In addition, in a few states the insurance department has also posted their own final/approved rate summary.
