Green Mountain Care Board Receives 2026 QHP Rate Requests Amid Rising Health Care Costs
Montpelier, VT – On May 12, 2025, the Green Mountain Care Board (GMCB) received the 2026 individual and small group health insurance premium rate filings from BlueCross and BlueShield of Vermont and MVP Health Plan. The filings will be posted on GMCB’s rate review website. The average rate increases being requested are shown below:
With the pending dire threat to several of these programs (primarily Medicaid & the ACA) from the House Republican Budget Proposal which recently passed, I'm going a step further and am generating pie charts which visualize just how much of every Congressional District's total population is at risk of losing healthcare coverage.
USE THE DROP-DOWN MENU ABOVE TO FIND YOUR STATE & DISTRICT.
Every year, I spend months painstakingly tracking every insurance carrier rate filing for the following year to determine just how much average insurance policy premiums on the individual market are projected to increase or decrease.
Carriers tendency to jump in and out of the market, repeatedly revise their requests, and the confusing blizzard of actual filing forms sometimes make it next to impossible to find the specific data I need. The actual data I need to compile my estimates are actually fairly simple, however. I really only need three pieces of information for each carrier:
Nearly a decade after then-Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin nixed a plan for a publicly funded system, advocates have renewed a push to transform health care with a single-payer system.
About 60 House Democrats have signed onto a proposal that calls for eventually replacing private health insurance premiums in the state with a public financing system. This week, supporters of the plan announced the creation of a universal healthcare caucus to push for the approval of the single-payer system.
The bill’s primary sponsor, Rep. Brian Cina, D-Burlington, said despite efforts to bring down the rate of uninsured Vermonters, thousands of people are still without healthcare coverage. He said those who may be eligible for healthcare plans have “fallen through the holes of a tattered social safety net.”
Every year, I spend months painstakingly tracking every insurance carrier rate filing for the following year to determine just how much average insurance policy premiums on the individual market are projected to increase or decrease.
Carriers tendency to jump in and out of the market, repeatedly revise their requests, and the confusing blizzard of actual filing forms sometimes make it next to impossible to find the specific data I need. The actual data I need to compile my estimates are actually fairly simple, however. I really only need three pieces of information for each carrier:
Every year, I spend months painstakingly tracking every insurance carrier rate filing for the following year to determine just how much average insurance policy premiums on the individual market are projected to increase or decrease.
Carriers tendency to jump in and out of the market, repeatedly revise their requests, and the confusing blizzard of actual filing forms sometimes make it next to impossible to find the specific data I need. The actual data I need to compile my estimates are actually fairly simple, however. I really only need three pieces of information for each carrier:
Voters in Kansas rejected a proposed state constitutional amendment Tuesday that would have said there was no right to an abortion in the state, according to The Associated Press.
Kansas was the first state to vote on abortion rights since the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson's Women's Health Organization.
President Joe Biden hailed Tuesday's vote and called on Congress to pass a law to restore nationwide abortion rights that were provided by Roe.
"This vote makes clear what we know: the majority of Americans agree that women should have access to abortion and should have the right to make their own health care decisions," Biden said in a statement.
The statewide abortion ban ballot proposal, in a fairly solidly red state, ended up failing by a massive 18 points, with 544,000 voting against it and only 378,00 in favor of it.
Hmmmm...Vermont's filings are usually pretty easy to average because a) they don't redact any of their filing data; b) they make the forms easy to access; and c) they only have two insurance carriers operating in the individual or small group markets anyway (in fact, it's the same two carriers in both markets).
Back in May, the preliminary individual market rate filings were +12.3% for Blue Cross Blue Shield of Vermont and +17.4% for MVP, for a weighted average increase of 14.7%, while the small group filings averaged out to +14.6%.
