Analysis of 2016 premium changes and insurer participation in the Affordable Care Act's health insurance marketplaces
- Collection:
- Health Policy and Services Research
- Series Title(s):
- Issue brief (Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation)
- Author(s):
- Cox, Cynthia, author Ma, Rosa, author Claxton, Gary, author Levitt, Larry, author
- Contributor(s):
- Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, issuing body.
- Publication:
- Menlo Park, CA : Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, June 2015
- Language(s):
- English
- Format:
- Text
- Subject(s):
- Health Insurance Exchanges -- economics Health Insurance Exchanges -- trends Insurance, Health -- economics Insurance, Health -- trends United States United States.
- Genre(s):
- Technical Report
- Abstract:
- Premium growth in the Affordable Care Act's Health Insurance Marketplaces has been an area of significant interest, as this is one of the most tangible and measurable indicators of whether the ACA is working to keep health insurance affordable. The ACA's rate review provision requires premium increases over ten percent to be made public. As a number of individual market insurers are requesting 2016 increases well above 10 percent, concern has been raised over the affordability of premiums in the coming year. However, these increases are not necessarily representative of the range of products from which consumers will be able to choose, and similar data is not widely available for the plans with moderate increases or decreases. This brief presents an early analysis of changes in the premiums for the lowest- and second-lowest cost silver marketplace plans in major cities in 10 states plus the District of Columbia, where we were able to find complete data on rates for all insurers. It follows a similar approach to our September 2013 and 2014 analyses of Marketplace premiums. In most of these 11 major cities, we find that the costs for the lowest and second-lowest cost silver plans--where the bulk of enrollees tend to migrate--are changing relatively modestly in 2016, although increases are generally bigger than in 2015. The cost of a benchmark silver plan in these cities is on average 4.4% higher in 2016 than in 2015. These premiums are still preliminary in some cases and could be raised or lowered through these states' rate review processes, and it is difficult to generalize to all states based on this small sample of states where all rate filings are available. We also find that the number of insurers participating has stayed the same or increased in 9 states, while insurer participation decreased in Michigan and the District of Columbia.
- Copyright:
- Reproduced with permission of the copyright holder. Further use of the material is subject to CC BY license. (More information)
- Extent:
- 1 online resource (1 PDF file (6 pages, 1 unnumbered page))
- Illustrations:
- Illustrations
- NLM Unique ID:
- 101670557 (See catalog record)
- Permanent Link:
- http://resource.nlm.nih.gov/101670557