Obamacare premiums to drop in Louisiana in 2019 after years of rate hikes
After seeing years of rate hikes, Louisiana residents getting health insurance through the Affordable Care Act’s individual exchange will see premiums drop in 2019 by an average of 6.4 percent.
The direction is an abrupt turnaround for the individual exchange, created under the ACA —commonly known as Obamacare — to offer insurance to people who don’t receive it through their jobs or other means. Until now, Louisiana’s individual market has weathered years of rising premiums, including a jump of 18.5 percent on average for 2018.
Alaska has only a single insurance carrier offering ACA-compliant individual market plans, so it should be a piece of cake to calculate their average premium change, since I don't have to calculate the relative market share.
Unfortunately, some carriers submit multiple filings for different lines of business even if they both use the same "Actuarial Memorandum" to justify the incresae...and often times the memo itself is redacted, with the critical data (covered lives, percent increases, dollar amounts, etc.) blocked out, making it kind of useless for my purposes. Such is the case with Premera Blue Cross Blue Shield, the sole ACA market carrier in Alaska. Thanks in large part to the state's successful reinsurance program, they'redropping rates by 7% on most of their policies, and by 10.3% on the rest...but I don't know the relative portion of each, so I can't be sure what the weighted average of the two is. The second listing is for Health Savings Account plans only, so I'm assuming the bulk of their enrollees have the first types of policies, which suggests roughly an 8% overall premium drop.
Last year Alabama had only a single insurance carrier, Blue Cross Blue Shield, offering individual market policies anywhere in the state. For 2018, a new carrier, Bright Health Insurance, jumped into the AL market. For 2019, both companies are lowering rates--BCBSAL is only dropping theirs slightly, but Bright clearly way overshot the mark out of the gate and is lowering their prices by 15.5% overall next year.
Unfortunately, neither of the filings clarifies just how many enrollees either has, so I don't know what the relative market share is; I'm going to assume that BCBS held onto about 90% of the total given their monopoly hold last year and the fact that Bright is a new/unknown player in the market (not to mention the fact that Bright seems to have overpriced their first year). Obviously I'll have to change this if I receive hard numbers to the contrary.
The Missouri Insurance Dept. has released preliminary 2019 rate filings for the individual and small group markets. Interestingly, in addition to the ACA compliant rate changes, they also posted transitional policy rate changes as well, which is unusual.
Missouri's situation is pretty straightforward: Three existing ACA market carriers are sticking around, and a fourth one is jumping in (Medica). Since Medica is new to the market, they don't have any actual rate changes to speak of. The other three are requesting rate increases of 3.7%, 7.3% and -8.6% respectively; Celtic is dropping rates next year.
.@HHSGov hosting media call on short-term plans at 6:30pm ET tonight, suggesting rule release is imminent. For bckground on what's proposed, see #GtownCHIR summary. https://t.co/qFzkLXayYc
The Trump administration issued new insurance rules Wednesday morning to encourage more Americans to buy inexpensive, skimpy health plans originally designed for short-term use.
Regular readers may have noticed that while I've written plenty about non-ACA compliant Short-Term, Limited Duration (STLD) healthcare policies (the "Short" part of my #ShortAssPlans hashtag), I've written far less about the "Ass" part...namely, Association Health Plans (AHPs)
The main reason for this is that I simply don't undertand AHPs as well and don't want to misinform people about them. The other reason is that they sort of have one foot each in the worlds of the Individual and Small Group markets, and I write mostly about the Individual market.
The report that follows estimates the premium and coverage impact of the DOL proposed rule over a 5-year period (2018-2022). If the rule is finalized as proposed, we estimate the following impacts on the individual and small-group markets:
Gov. David Ige signed a new law on Thursday that ensures certain benefits under the Affordable Care Act will be preserved under Hawaii law.
Senate Bill 2340 retains several of the measures introduced in the Obama-era legislation, also known as Obamacare, including a clause that allows Hawaii adults up to 26 years-old to continue receiving health insurance under their parents.
The law also prohibits health insurance organizations from excluding coverage to those with preexisting conditions, or using an individual's gender to determine premiums or contributions to health insurance plans.
State’s Market Stability Workgroup Recommends Immediate Action to Protect Rhode Islanders from Federal Threats to Health Insurance Access and Affordability
Posted on June 27, 2018 | By HealthSource RI
EAST PROVIDENCE, R.I. (June 27, 2018) – Rhode Island must act “without delay” to protect consumers from rising health coverage costs brought on by federal policy changes according to a report issued to Governor Raimondo by the state’s Market Stability Workgroup.
“People representing a wide variety of viewpoints engaged in lively discussions over the course of 8 weeks,” said Workgroup co-chair Bill Wray, Chief Risk Officer at the Washington Trust. “The fruits of those discussions are in this report. All of us – consumer advocates, business groups, health insurers and providers – were able to broadly agree on how best to protect Rhode Island’s insurance markets.”
For weeks now, I've been painstakingly analyzing and plugging in the preliminary 2019 rate change data for ACA-compliant individual market as each state submits their filings. As of today, I've compiled data for 18 states (+DC), comprising perhaps 40% of the total ACA individual market, give or take. The table below shows where things stand at the moment.
Those yellow and manilla cells at the bottom are not a typo: To the best of my estimates so far, the insurance carriers across these 19 markets are asking for average 2019 unsubsidized premium rate increases of around 10-11%...however, as far as I can tell, they would be keeping rates FLAT year over year (on average), for the first time since the ACA launched, if not for three sabotage efforts by Donald Trump and Congressional Republicans: Repeal of the ACA's individual mandate, and Trump's removal of restrictions on non-ACA compliant "Short-Term, Limited Duration" and "Association" plans, which I've shorthanded as simply #ShortAssPlans....and in fact would actually be dropping in quite a few states (or, in the case of Minnesota, dropping more than they already are set to with those factors):
UPDATED 6/22/18: Added Indiana and Iowa to the table.
UPDATED 6/25/18: Added Florida, Kentucky, Ohio and Texas* to the table *(Texas only has about 1/3 of the total ACA individual market accounted for, so it could easily change) UPDATED 7/3/18: Added Montana and Georgia to the table UPDATED 7/13/18: Added Tennessee, updated Texas to add BCBSTX UPDATED 7/16/18: Added Colorado UPDATED 7/17/18: Added Nevada UPDATED 7/19/18: Added California UPDATED 7/20/18: Added Connecticut
