Wyoming

With only 5 days to go before the launch of the 2018 Open Enrollment Period, time is rapidly running out for me to wrap up my 2018 Rate Hike Project. I started this, as I have for 3 years now, back in late early May with the very first requested rate changes out of Virginia, and have been tracking all 50 states as the summer and fall have passed, following every twist and turn of the insane repeal/replace circus in Congress, Trump's bloviating and blathering about "blowing things up" and "letting Obamacare explode", the last-ditch "Graham-Cassidy" sideshow and everything else, right up to and through Trump lowering the boom on cutting off CSR reimbursement payments.

Not the highest-profile ACA/healthcare story in the world, but Wyoming almost never makes the news, and this is especially noteworthy given the state, the Governor and the GOP having total control over the federal government:

As health care debate simmers, Mead laments lack of Medicaid expansion in Wyoming

Gov. Matt Mead lamented the $100 million that Wyoming left on the table by choosing not to expand Medicaid, and he expressed concern for the state’s hospitals while discussing health care with the Star-Tribune recently.

Mead echoed some of the fears that many Wyoming hospital officials have expressed for months: that congressional proposals to overhaul the health care system may have negative effects on facilities here and that the state has suffered because it chose not to allow more people to qualify for Medicaid.

“The idea that we did not accept Medicaid expansion and things are going to be good just hasn’t turned out,” he said.

Alabama, Alaska and Wyoming only have a single insurance carrier participating in each of their individual markets. While this is a bad thing from a competitiveness POV, it cetainly makes things easier for me from a tracking-average-rate-hikes POV.

ALSO IMPORTANT: The HHS Dept. is also starting to upload the rate filings to the official RateReview.Healthcare.Gov database, which should make things easier for me going forward (assuming that the data is uploaded properly and isn't messed with, which is a distinct possibility when it comes to the Trump Administration)

Officially, Alabama has the infamous "Freedom Life" phantom plan which is asking for a whopping 71.6% rate hike...to allegedly cover exactly one (1) person statewide. Un-huh.

Aside from that, however, it's Blue Cross Blue Shield across all three states...and they're asking for the following:

While poking around in the SERFF rate filing database for different states, I occasionally find filings which DON'T apply to ACA-compliant policies or enrollees but which are of interest to healthcare nerds such as myself. I've decided to bundle these into a single post as they pop up, so check this entry once in awhile.

IOWA: Big Kahuna carrier Wellmark submitted a filing for non-ACA compliant small group policies (either grandfathered or transitional) which have effective/renewal dates of July, August or September 2017. The requested rate increase is 7.0% on average, which is pretty typical for small group plans, and it appears that Wellmark had 51,003 people enrolled in such policies as of 12/31/16. Nothing odd there.

What interested me, however, was this sentence:

Last week I noted that with 41 states accounted for and the 2017 Open Enrollment Period quickly bearing down on everyone, it was time to pull the plug on my 2017 Average Rate Hike project and move on. I had come up with an overall national weighted unsubsidized average rate increase of around 25% for ACA-compliant individual market plans.

However, I also noted that I'd make sure to fill in the approved rates for the remaining 10 states as they came in, for completeness sake...and today, thanks to the HHS Dept. cutting the ribbon on 2017 Window Shopping at HealthCare.Gov, I've also been able to fill in the blanks for five of the remaining states all in one shot (the other five remain elusive).

With only 584,000 residents, Wyoming is the smallest state, with a population over 10% smaller than even the District of Columbia or Vermont. Last year there were only 2 insurance carriers offering individual policies on the ACA exchange, Blue Cross and WINhealth. The average rate increase for 2016 was right around 10% even.

Unfortunately, WINhealth, a not-for-profit organization which had been around for 20 years, ended up as one of the few NON-Co-ops to go belly up last fall due specifically to Marco Rubio's Risk Corridor Massacre:

WINhealth sent along this release saying: As of October 8, 2015, WINhealth has chosen not to participate in the individual market, to include the federal exchange, for the 2016 plan year. The decision not to participate stems from a recent announcement from the federal government regarding the risk corridor program .

12 days ago, private Wyoming health insurer WINhealth, in business since 1996, was among the 5 (and counting) victims of the horrific Risk Corridor Massacre, which has already taken the lives of at least 4 ACA-created CO-OP insurers:

WINhealth sent along this release saying: As of October 8, 2015, WINhealth has chosen not to participate in the individual market, to include the federal exchange, for the 2016 plan year. The decision not to participate stems from a recent announcement from the federal government regarding the risk corridor program .

Just hours ago I posted a lengthy screed about the first clear victim of the Great Risk Corridor Debacle of 2015. In that case, both the culprit (the GOP's insistence on cutting off government funding guarantees for the risk corridor program) as well as the victim (the Kentucky Health CO-OP) both originated with the Affordable Care Act itself.

This time around, however, the victim (well, in addition to its current enrollees) is a private company, albeit a not-for-profit one: WINhealth Partners:

We’re a not-for-profit managed care company founded by professionals, and we’re changing the way that healthcare works for you – because we believe your insurance should help you to be at your best in life.

Wyoming's total individual health insurance market in 2014 was just 27,000 people. While the total market likely increased somewhat this year, those gains are likely offset by perhaps 15% being either "grandfathered" or "transitional" policies.

Just over 18,000 were enrolled in effectuated exchange-based policies as of June 30 of this year, leaving perhaps 9,000 more enrolled in off-exchange plans.

According to Louise Norris of HealthInsurance.org, there's only two companies operating on the exchange in Wyoming this year: WINhealth Partners and BCBS of WY. WINhealth is asking for a 13.37% average rate hike; Blue Cross is asking for an uknown increase...except that it's under 10%.