As a result of today’s announcement, up to an additional 18,000 people in Missouri will be eligible for Medicaid for a full year after pregnancy. Medicaid covers 41% of all births in the nation and more than half of all children in the country. With the approval of Missouri’s plan, an estimated 641,000 Americans across 40 states, the District of Columbia, and the U.S. Virgin Islands now have access to extended postpartum coverage. If all states adopted this option, as many as 720,000 people across the United States would be guaranteed Medicaid and CHIP coverage for 12 months after pregnancy.
New Hampshire Insurance Department Announces the Launch of 2024 Open Enrollment Period for Affordable Care Act Individual Marketplace and Releases 2024 Premium Rates
CONCORD, NH (October 31, 2023) – Today, the New Hampshire Insurance Department (NHID) kicked off the Open Enrollment Period for Granite Staters who are seeking individual health coverage on the Affordable Care Act (ACA) Individual Marketplace. The Open Enrollment Period runs from Tuesday, November 1, 2023, through Sunday, January 15, 2024.
“This is a significant opportunity for Granite Staters who do not have health insurance through their employer, Medicare, or Medicaid to enroll in the Individual Marketplace,” said New Hampshire Insurance Commissioner DJ Bettencourt. “For the fourth consecutive year, the 1332 Waiver has resulted in premiums for the individual market being the lowest in New England, ensuring more individuals have access to the healthcare they need.”
The good news about New Hampshire's health insurance market is that they're the only state without its own ACA exchange which produces publicly-accessible monthly reports on individual on-exchange market enrollment. The bad news is that they don't seem to publish the actual rate filings in an easy-to-read format, which means I'm left with the federal rate review website, which sometimes posts average rate requests which don't match up with the actual filings...but it's gonna have to do here.
With these two data sources in hand, New Hampshire's individual market carriers are asking for a weighted average increase of 3.1%. It's important to note that Anthem Health Plans and Matthew Thornton Health Plan are listed as separate carriers on the federal Rate Review website (with separate average rate requests), but on the state's monthly report, they're merged into a single listing.
The good news about New Hampshire's health insurance market is that they're the only state without its own ACA exchange which produces publicly-accessible monthly reports on individual on-exchange market enrollment. The bad news is that they don't seem to publish the actual rate filings in an easy-to-read format, which means I'm left with the federal rate review website. The problem with that is the rate filings are mostly heavily redacted, making it impossible to get the total enrollment data.
As I noted last night, thanks to the federal Rate Review website finally being updated to include the final, approved 2022 rates for both the individual and small group markets in all 50 states (+DC), I've been able to fill in the missing data for my annual ACA Rate Change Project.
As I note there, the overall weighted average looks like it'll be roughly +3.5% nationally.
Normally I write up a separate entry for both the preliminary and approved rate changes in each individual state, but it seems like overkill to create 14 separate entries at once. Besides, in many of these states there's been few if any changes between the preliminary and approved rate changes.
The good news about New Hampshire's health insurance market is that they're the only state without its own ACA exchange which produces publicly-accessible monthly reports on individual on-exchange market enrollment. The bad news is that they don't seem to publish the actual rate filings in an easy-to-read format, which means I'm left with the federal rate review website. The problem with that is the rate filings are mostly heavily redacted, making it impossible to get the total enrollment data.
As a result, I only have on-exchange enrollment numbers for the individual market and no enrollment data for five of the six small group market carriers in New Hampshire. For the individual market, it looks like the off-exchange market only has around 7,000 enrollees, since nearly 48,000 are on-exchange.
Assuming similar ratios for the off-exchange market, that's a weighted average increase of 3.2%; if not, the unweighted average increase is just under 5.0%.
I've once again relaunched my project from last fall to track Medicaid enrollment (both standard and expansion alike) on a monthly basis for every state dating back to the ACA being signed into law.
For the various enrollment data, I'm using data from Medicaid.gov's Medicaid Enrollment Data Collected Through MBES reports. Unfortunately, they've only published enrollment data through December 2020. In some states I've been able to get more recent enrollment data from state websites and other sources.
Now that I've developed a standardized format/layout & methodology for tracking both state- and county-level COVID vaccination levels by partisan lean (which can also be easily applied to other variables like education level, median income, population density, ethnicity, etc), I've started moving beyond my home state of Michigan.
This is a HUGE deal, especially in California, where an estimated 430,000 residents are enrolled in off-exchange ACA policies which are virtually identical to their on-exchange equivalent, with the sole distinction of those enrolled in them not being eligible for ACA subsidies.
With subsidies being beefed up and the 400% FPL subsidy cliff having been killed (for the next 2 years, at least), this means that hundreds of thousands of Californians have just become eligible for thousands of dollars in savings...as long as they transition to the same plan on-exchange.
Large Decreases in 2021 Premium Rates Expected in Individual Market
CONCORD, NH – The federal government has published information on proposed rates for New Hampshire’s health insurance exchange (https://ratereview.healthcare.gov/) in 2021.
The New Hampshire Insurance Department is reviewing 2021 forms and rates for individual health plans. For 2020, the second lowest cost silver plan was $404.60. The 2021 second lowest cost silver plan proposed premium rate is $318.95. This represents a 21.2% decrease.
It's important to note that the 21.2% decrease only refers to the difference between the 2020 benchmark and the 2021 benchmark plans. They aren't necessarily from the same carrier, and even if they are, that's not the same as the weighted average rate changes for all policies at all metal levels from all carriers.