I just received another official update from the MA Health Connector...
On enrollment, as of today, we have 261,619 enrolled members for January. We have an additional 14,368 plan selections made (but unpaid) for a total of 275,994 under the CMS definitions. New enrollments for 2019 continue to trend slightly ahead of last year.
A week or so ago I noted that Massachusetts had enrolled just over 264,000 people (10,000 of whom hadn't actually paid their January premium yet...MA's exchange is one of the only states which is able to actually track payment data live, since they handle it themselves). They were up 10K over the same date in 2017, or up around 4% year over year.
I don't have a hard "thru 12/05" number for 2017 this week, but they did confirm the 276K number is still "slightly ahead", which is good.
I just received an official 2019 ACA Open Enrollment Period report from the Massachusetts Health Connector...
As of today, we have 254,177 enrolled for January 1. That is up about 10,000 from last year's 244,308 at the same date. When you include people with plans selected but not paid, we are at 264,118.
The high number is again explained by the fact that Massachusetts, like several other state-based exchanges, front-loads their auto-renewals. 254K / 244K = around a 4% increase year over year, which is solid and right in line with other state-based exchanges to date...while the federal exchange (HC.gov) continues to lag around 11% behind last year. On the other hand, HC.gov doesn't front-load auto-renewals, so it's a bit of an apples to oranges comparison.
As I just noted earlier this afternoon, Massachusetts is NOT expecting the repeal of the ACA's individual mandate to impact their 2019 individual market enrollment or premiums for a simple reason: The Bay State never formally repealed their own, pre-ACA mandate penalty. They basically mothballed it once the ACA's version went into effect, and are simply dusting it off for 2019 and beyond now that the federal mandate has been formally repealed.
However, the two mandate penalties don't work quite the same way. For the federal mandate, unless you qualify for an exemption (and there's a whole bunch of those), the penalty for not having ACA-compliant healthcare coverage is (or has been up until now) as follows:
Ready for Open Enrollment, Health Connector sets 2019 plans with lower premium increases, selects community organizations to provide in-person support to residents
Boston – September 13, 2018 – The Massachusetts Health Connector Board of Directors today approved 57 Qualified Health Plans from nine carriers for individuals and families, with new plan designs that create better value for members and premium increases that average under 5 percent from 2018.
Unfortunately, the press release doesn't specify what "under 5%" means, nor does it break that out by carrier/market share. I've put in a request for those details and will update this as soon as I hear back from them. They sent me the following chart, but this only includes enrollees earning between 300-400% of the Federal Poverty Level, which means the marketshare across the entire individual market is likely somewhat different. I'm assuming the 4.4% overall average applies to the entire market but could be wrong about that as well:
NOTE: The good news is that I don't have to worry about any sabotage impact for Massachusetts in 2019 (thanks to the state still having their pre-ACA individual mandate penalty in place and banning #ShortAssPlans outright). This obviously makes that part of my analysis very easy--I can just enter "0%" across the board in the "2018 sabotage factor" columns.
The bad news is that determining the market share for each carrier in Massachusetts is a royal pain in the ass. only two of the twelve carriers offering individual market plans actually state what their enrollment numbers are, and this is further confused by the fact that several of them (Fallon, Harvard Pilgrim and Tufts) have two or three different listings for different divisions of the company.
In addition, Massachusetts is one of just two states where the individual and small group market risk pools are merged, making it even more difficult to separate out the two for market share purposes.
UnitedHealthcare is returning to one of the government-run health exchanges that the nation's largest insurer largely abandoned in 2017.
Minnetonka-based UnitedHealthcare must sell coverage next year on the health exchange for Massachusetts because it now covers more than 5,000 people in the state via small-employer health plans.
The individual and small-group markets are merged in Massachusetts, where state law requires insurers of a certain size to sell on the exchange.
I wrote about this back in April, but even I didn't think much of it at the time--I assumed it was more of a symbolic proposal than anything, or that it would die in committee at most. The details are important, of course, but assuming they make sense, this is exactly the sort of approach I would recommend in trying to gradually transition to some type of universal single-payer like system. The biggest questions I'd want answered are 1) What type of coverage does Medicaid actually have in Nevada? It varies widely from state to state, so if NV's is pretty comprehensive, awesome, but if it's skimpy, that's not very helpful; 2) What sort of premiums/deductibles/co-pays would buy-in enrollees be looking at?; 3) What sort of impact would this have on the state budget?; and most significantly, 4) How many Nevada doctors/hospitals would accept these enrollees? Remember, the reason a significant chunk of healthcare providers don't accept Medicaid patients is because it only reimburses them around 50¢ on the dollar compared to private insurance.
This post was inspired by a Twitter query by "Other Alex". He originally asked about the insanely expensive premiums for ACA policies in Charlottesville, Virginia, which I wrote about the other day. Anyway, after some back & forth between him, myself and Colin Baillio, Alex asked if I knew where the least-expensive ACA plans are.
I haven't looked it up by rating area yet (for instance, Virginia as a whole ranks 18th most expensive this year even though Charlottesville is the most expensive rating area in the country), but on a state-level basis, it appears that the least expensive state for ACA-compliant individual healthcare policies is actually...(drumroll please)...
