The ACA exchange in Arizona has hadsome prettydramaticturns over the past month or so. When the dust settled, every county in the state will still have at least one carrier offering plans on the exchange...although only one. Anyway, today the AZ DOI joined Pennsylvania and Michigan in releasing their final approved rate hikes for both the individual and small group markets:
Arizona’s Pinal County Gains Health-Law Exchange Insurer
Blue Cross Blue Shield of Arizona will offer plans on the Affordable Care Act exchange in Arizona’s Pinal County next year, resolving a situation that drew a national spotlight because it represented a major challenge to the mechanics of the health law.
When Aetna Inc. announced last month that it would withdraw from the exchange in Arizona, among other states, it left Pinal at risk of becoming the first U.S. county without a single insurer selling exchange plans. Aetna had been expected to sell exchange plans in Pinal County, where approximately 10,000 people had signed up for ACA plans.
When I last crunched the numbers for the 2017 individual market in Arizona, the average requested rate hike statewide was a whopping 68%. However, that was before Aetna dropped their bombshell about dropping out of the exchanges in 11 states (AZ included), leaving about 6,400 residents receiving ACA tax credits in Pinal County with no subsidized policy options whatsoever.
Since Aetna had intended on requesting a jaw-dropping 85.8% average rate hike if they had stuck around, this technically meant that the average requested hike for the other carriers would have dropped somewhat, although this would be limited by Aetna only having about 7% of the individual market in the state.
Over at the National Review, Michael "King v. Burwell" Cannon of the CATO Institute and self-described Obamacare-slayer has penned a piece which tears into the ACA over the situation in Pinal County, Arizona, where, barring a last-minute development, several thousand residents are about to find themselves in a pretty unpleasant situation when it comes to finding a new healthcare policy for 2017. As I noted last week:
Pinal County won’t have a company offering marketplace health insurance plans next year following the nation’s third-largest health insurer’s decision to exit public exchanges in all but four states.
Aetna was the only insurer planning to offer Affordable Care Act plans in Pinal County for 2017. It currently only sells in Maricopa County but had planned to expand to Pinal County.
Amidst my Aetna Postapalooza yesterday, there's one important point which other outlets have brought up which I haven't addressed yet: Pinal County, Arizona.
Since participation in the ACA exchanges has always been voluntary for carriers selling ACA-compliant individual policies (except for the District of Columbia (and until recently, Vermont), where carriers are legally required to only sell individual policies via the exchange), there's always been the danger that sooner or later there might be a situation where no carriers are selling on the exchange. Not "a few", not "only one"...zilch.
In my mind, I've always thought of this problem in statewide terms; it wasn't until 2015 that I even realized that many carriers only sell policies in some of the counties in a given state, not all of them. That makes the list of 300+ exchange carriers nationwide a bit misleading; some of the carriers listed for a given state might only be selling in a few or just a single county, making the scenario above far more likely to happen.
As of last week, five companies in Arizona had announced plans to pull out or pull back: Health Choice, United Healthcare, Humana, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Arizona and Health Net.
CMS approves Arizona’s plan to re-open CHIP program
Today, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) announced that it has approved Arizona’s plan to allow new enrollment in the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) after enrollment was frozen for several years. Now all states provide CHIP coverage to eligible children.
“Today’s approval is a step forward for the health of Arizona children in low-income families,” said Vikki Wachino, CMS Deputy Administrator and Director of the Center for Medicaid and CHIP Services. “With Arizona’s decision, all states in the nation now provide CHIP coverage to any eligible child who applies. More children in Arizona will have access to coverage early in their lives, which helps kids grow into healthy adults and provides parents with the peace of mind that comes from their children having affordable coverage.”
Having coverage through CHIP improves children’s health and increases their ability to succeed in school. Recent research on Medicaid and CHIP shows that these gains are long lasting, with children who gained coverage experiencing better health, higher educational attainment, and higher earnings as adults.
Republican lawmakers maneuver to force a vote on KidsCare, reviving a debate over the role of government in people's lives vs. personal responsibility
Chastened and angry over their failure to reinstate KidsCare, Republican lawmakers in the Arizona House got Democrats to join them Thursday in a successful bid to revive the children’s health-insurance program.
