Charles Gaba's blog

Louise Norris is an awesome source for all sorts of healthcare policy/insurance data, but she's especially on top of developments in her home state of Colorado, where she and her husband Jay run a small brokerage outlet.

Today Jay and Louise have a couple of interesting tidbits out of The Centennial State (yeah, I had to look up their nickname myself).

First, according to Jay (via the Connect for Health Colorado exchange itself), as of May 7, 2018, C4HCO had exactly 142,474 people enrolled in effectuated ACA exchange policies statewide. This is noteworthy mainly because 161,764 people selected Qualified Health Plan (QHP) policies during the 2018 Open Enrollment Period.

That's (sort of) an 88% retention rate through early May. I say "sort of" because this presumably includes some amount of churn (if 100 people drop coverage and 100 off-season enrollees sign up, that'd be a net change of zero). Even so, it's actually slightly better compared to prior years, when the national effectuation number had usually dropped to around 87% by the end of March.

 

As promised, here's Part 2 of my Risk Pool explainer video!

Part 1 went over the basics of how risk pools work in general, and why segregating sick people into a separate pool is a terrible idea.

In Part 2, I go into more detail about the different types of NON-ACA plans available on the individual market, why they mostly stink, and how the repeal of the Individual Mandate Penalty, especially when combined with Trump's yanking away restrictions on "short-term" and "association" plans, will take an existing problem and make it far worse.

Oh, yeah: It involves Dabney Coleman and Morgan Freeman.

...which brings me to today's Detroit News, via Jonathan Oosting:

Senate uses salary threat to push Medicaid work plan

Lansing — Michigan’s Republican-led Senate is pressuring Gov. Rick Snyder to back sweeping changes to the state’s Medicaid health insurance system, including proposed work requirements and a tougher 48-month benefit limit for the Healthy Michigan plan.

I've trashed CMS Administrator Seema Verma many times for her callous and backward-logic driven push to impose pointless, counterproductive work requirements on ACA Medicaid expansion enrollees. However, it appears that even she has her limits when it comes to treating people terribly:

The Trump administration has drawn a red line on Medicaid cuts. There are some proposals that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services won’t approve.

In a letter on Monday, CMS Administrator Seema Verma told Kansas officials that her agency would not approve the state’s request to impose lifetime limits, which would have capped a person’s eligibility at three years, after which they could no longer be covered by the program.

Verma noted that the administration had approved proposals by other states to cut off benefits for Medicaid enrollees only if they fail to meet certain work requirements.

Presented without comment:

President Trump is sending a plan to Congress that calls for stripping more than $15 billion in previously approved spending, with the hope that it will temper conservative angst over ballooning budget deficits.

Almost half of the proposed cuts would come from two accounts within the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) that White House officials said expired last year or are not expected to be drawn upon. An additional $800 million in cuts would come from money created by the Affordable Care Act in 2010 to test innovative payment and service delivery models.

Those are just a handful of the more than 30 programs the White House is proposing to Congress for “rescission,” a process of culling back money that was previously authorized. Once the White House sends the request to Congress, lawmakers have 45 days to vote on the plan or a scaled-back version of it through a simple majority vote.

Hot on the heels of Virginia, Maryland is the 2nd state to post their preliminary 2019 unsubsidized ACA policy rate increase requests. According to Paul Demko of Politico...

Insurers selling Obamacare plans in Maryland are again seeking huge rate increases for 2019, but they could be knocked down significantly by a reinsurance program the state hopes to implement for next year.

CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield wants to increase rates on average by 18.5 percent on its HMO plans, which account for more than half of the individual market this year. Kaiser Permanente, the only other insurer selling on the exchange, is seeking a 37.4 percent average increase on its HMO plans, which cover just over a third of Obamacare customers.

A couple of days ago, I posted that Virginia has become the first state out of the gate with their preliminary 2019 premium rate requests for ACA individual policies. However, I made sure to emphasize that these are preliminary requests only; carriers often resubmit their rate change requests more than once over the course of the summer/fall, and even that may not match whatever the final, approved rate changes are by the state insurance commissioner.

In addition, I generally try to make it understood that there's alotof room for error here--the weighted averages are based on the number of current enrollees, but of course that number can change from month to month as people drop policies or sign up during the off-season (via Special Enrollment Periods). Even then, the rate filing paperwork is often vague or confusing about just how many enrollees they actually have in these plans. Sometimes wonks are reduced to taking the number of "member months" and dividing by 12 to get a rough idea of how many people are enrolled in any given month. Sometimes the only number of enrollees available are from last year, which could bear zero resemblence to how many are currently enrolled. Sometimes the only number available is how many people the carrier expects to enroll in their policies next year. And so on.

Aside from Virginia, it's likely going to be another month or so before the 2019 ACA policy rate filings start trickling in, since the deadline for initial rate requests isn't until late June in most states. However, there's some interesting non-ACA policy filing stuff which is available as well. Given all the concern about non-ACA compliant policies siphoning healthy people away from the ACA market, I figured I should take a look at a few of these.

Here in Michigan, I've found three such filings: One is for "transitional" plans from Golden Rule (a subsidiary of Unitedhealthcare, I believe). The other two are for "short-term" plans (the type which Donald Trump is basically removing any regulation on).

First up, Golden Rule:

IMORTANT UPDATE: As I suspected, it turns out that the stray rate filing posted to the California Insurance Dept. website a few days ago was posted prematurely, doesn't reflect the carrier's final* rate filing, and has since been pulled from the California Insurance Dept. website.

I've been asked to remove the filing data, and seeing how there's nothing nefarious about it (I wasn't "whistleblowing" evidence of anything criminal/unethical), I'm complying with that request. Since everything in the post related to that data, there wasn't much point in keeping the rest of it either.

*(Yes, I'm aware that none of these early filings are "final" since they tend to be revised/resubmitted throughout the summer/fall, but you know what I mean.)

...and to absolutely no one's surprise, GOP sabotage of the ACA will be directly responsible for a significant chunk of the individual market premium increases.

Every year for 3 years running, I've spent the entire spring/summer/early fall 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 going to increase (or, in a few rare instances, actually decrease).

The actual work is difficult due to the ever-changing landscape as carriers jump in and out of the market, their tendency repeatedly revise their requests, and the confusing blizzard of actual filing forms which sometimes make it easy to find the specific data I need and sometimes make it next to impossible.

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