Category: Implementation

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services on Monday issued a proposed rule to govern how Obamacare exchanges will operate in 2018. The proposal would change Obamacare’s risk adjustment program to account for prescription drug data.

Currently, the government determines which plans have sicker enrollees, and thus should receive assistance, based on claims data.

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On Tuesday, Commissioner Julie Mix McPeak, who runs Tennessee’s Department of Commerce and Insurance, announced that her department was approving massive premium increases for insurers providing individual health insurance policies through the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act exchange in the state.

The percentage increases are stunning and prompted the commissioner to put them in context. Her context was more stunning than the increases themselves.

“I would characterize the exchange market in Tennessee as very near collapse,” McPeak said.

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Enrollment in the insurance exchanges for President Obama’s signature health-care law is at less than half the initial forecast, pushing several major insurance companies to stop offering health plans in certain markets because of significant financial losses.

As a result, the administration’s promise of a menu of health-plan choices has been replaced by a grim, though preliminary, forecast: Next year, more than 1 in 4 counties are at risk of having a single insurer on its exchange, said Cynthia Cox, who studies health reform for the Kaiser Family Foundation.

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In the wake of Aetna’s recent announcement that it was pulling up stakes in 11 of 15 states where it had been selling insurance on Obamacare exchanges, there are more alarming signs that other major insurers are struggling to remain in the game.

On Tuesday, three of the major players in Tennessee — Cigna Health Insurance, Humana and Blue Cross Blue Shield — were granted huge double-digit premium increases for the 2017 season beginning in January amid a warning from the state’s insurance commissioner that the Obamacare markets were “very near collapse.”

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As of January 1, 2014, insurers are no longer able to deny coverage or charge higher premiums based on preexisting conditions (under rules referred to as guaranteed issue and modified community rating, respectively). These aspects of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) – along with tax credits for low and middle income people buying insurance on their own in new health insurance marketplaces – make it easier for people with preexisting conditions to gain insurance coverage. However, if not accompanied by other regulatory measures, these provisions could have unintended consequences for the insurance market. Namely, insurers may try to compete by avoiding sicker enrollees rather than by providing the best value to consumers. In addition, in the early years of market reform insurers faced uncertainty as to how to price coverage as new people (including those previously considered “uninsurable”) gained coverage, potentially leading to premium volatility. This brief explains three provisions of the ACA – risk adjustment, reinsurance, and risk corridors – that were intended to promote insurer competition on the basis of quality and value and promote insurance market stability, particularly in the early years of reform.

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Three years ago, health economists believed Obamacare’s soon-to-launch marketplaces would grow to replace much of America’s fractured, complex employer-based health insurance system.

Predictions for the employer-sponsored insurance system’s collapse ran rampant. The question around companies shifting workers to the new public marketplaces was often framed not as if but when. University of Pennsylvania’s Zeke Emanuel pegged it at 2025. MIT’s Jonathan Gruber estimated 2050.

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Recently, Avalere worked with the Council for Affordable Health Coverage to examine enrollment trends for the Affordable Care Act (ACA).

Avalere projects that 10.1 million individuals will be enrolled in an exchange plan by the end of 2016. To date, exchange enrollment has not reached original projection numbers. In March 2010, the Congressional Budget Office predicted enrollment figures for 2016 to be at 21 million. Their projections have decreased since then- in January 2016 it was 13 million and in March 2016, it was 12 million. The Obama administration projects 10 million in enrollment for 2016.

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Five Republican-led states and several provider groups are suing to block a new Obamacare rule that’s meant to prevent health care providers and insurers from discriminating against transgender patients.

The five states — Texas, Wisconsin, Kentucky, Nebraska and Kansas — and the provider groups argue that the nondiscrimination rule requires doctors to perform gender transition procedures even when they are against the doctor’s medical judgment.

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Health insurance startup Oscar Insurance Corp. will reevaluate its approach to Obamacare after suffering significant losses under the U.S. program and will pull out of two markets next year.

Oscar, which pitches itself as a tech-savvy alternative to traditional health insurers, plans to end sales of Affordable Care Act plans in Dallas, a market it entered this year, and New Jersey. It’s part of a more conservative approach by the New York-based company as it plans to introduce insurance products for businesses next year.

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People joked for a while about how insurers were pulling out of Obamacare markets so fast we might end up with areas in which there were no insurers at all.  It’s no joke anymore: with Aetna’s massive withdrawal yesterday from the Affordable Care Act marketplace, Pinal County, Arizona, the third most populated county in that state, currently has no insurers selling policies on the Exchange.  The issue isn’t so much whether people will be subject to the individual mandate tax of up to 2.5% of their income when there are no policies available; an administration that has no difficulty calling a utility shutoff notice a hardship that excuses one from the individual mandate (whether or not the utility was actually shut off) should have no difficulty declaring the non-existence of any insurance to be grounds for an exemption.  The issue is that Pinal County, although a bit of an outlier for now, is a harbinger for fundamental problems with the ACA now manifesting themselves with greater clarity across the country. When an insurer covering over 7% of those in the Exchanges and previously hoping to expand instead drops out, we better look at what is going on.

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