Note: I decided that while the original headline accurately reflected my feelings about this WSJ Op-Ed, it was a bit over the top, so I've changed it to something less crude.
For years, the Patient Protection & Affordable Care Act, generally shorthanded as the ACA or, more colloquially known as "Obamacare," was the top policy target of Republicans and other conservatives.
It seemed as though not a day went by without some right-wing opinion piece being published attacking the ACA for one thing or another. Once in awhile these attacks had some validity, but the vast majority were either completely baseless or grossly exaggerated.
And yet, after the dust settled on the infamous 2017 ACA "repeal/replace" debacle, it seemed as though the GOP had pretty much tired of their relentless assault on the healthcare law. They had failed to repeal it even with control of the White House, Senate, House of Representatives and Supreme Court, and ended up settling for zeroing out of the federal Individual Mandate Penalty as a consolation prize.
Last week Amy Lotven of Inside Health Policy noted that the 5th Circuit Court panel was trying to come up with some sort of stopgap solution to the ongoing Braidwood v. Becerra lawsuit until such time as the case winds its way up to the U.S. Supreme Court.
One judge on the federal appeals court panel considering whether an order blocking HHS from enforcing the Affordable Care Act preventive services coverage mandate should continue to be partially stayed through its appeal is urging the parties to pursue a workable resolution, and legal expert Tim Jost says the panel appeared open to the government’s suggestion the court issue a narrow solution that only applies to insurers in Texas.
When we last checked in on the Braidwood v. Becerra federal lawsuit, there was a lot of confusion as to exactly which preventative services mandated by the Affordable Care Act to be covered at no out-of-pocket (OOP) charge to enrollees were supposed to be stricken and which weren't.
...Well, just one day after the Bright Healthcare bombshell news broke, Texas-based health insurance broker Jenny Chumbley Hogue sounded the alarm on another large carrier bailing on Texas next year:
If this was any other state besides Georgia--even any other GOP-controlled state--I'd say good for them since it would presumably just mean that they were the latest state to move to their own state-based exchange (which is how the ACA was originally envisioned anyway).
This would give them the ability to hook the SBM into their state databases for auto-enrolling residents receiving SNAP benefits/etc into $0-premium coverage, or to integrate supplemental subsidies as nearly a dozen states do today, and so forth. There's several upsides to moving to an SBM, up to & including reducing the user fees (although those have been significantly reduced on the federal exchange in recent years anyway).
Back in August I was able to postestimated preliminary average 2023 rate changes for Texas' individual market. I emphasize "estimated" because the state insurance dept. website isn't helpful and even the filings found in the SERFF database only include actual enrollment data for about half of the dozen or so insurance carriers offering policies on the TX indy market. For the remaining carriers I had to use my best guesstimate of what the market share of each was in order to come up with a weighted average increase, which turned out to be +8.8% for unsubsidized enrollees.
MICHIGAN: Another One (Mostly) Bites The Dust; 12th CO-OP Drops Off Exchange, May Go Belly-Up
It appears that East Lansing-based Consumers Mutual Insurance of Michigan could wind down operations this year as it is not participating in the state health insurance exchange for 2016.
But officials of Consumers Mutual today are discussing several options that could determine its future status with the state Department of Insurance and Financial Services, said David Eich, marketing and public relations officer with Consumers Mutual.
Consumers Mutual CEO Dennis Litos said: "We are reviewing our situation (financial condition) with DIFS and should conclude on a future direction this week.”
While Eich said he could not disclose the options, he said one is “winding down” the company, which has 28,000 members, including about 6,000 on the exchange.
Going forward, it looks like I'm going to have to do some educated guesses for a lot of carrier enrollment numbers for the states which haven't made their full 2023 rate filing data publicly available either on their own insurance dept. sites or even via the SERFF database.
The federal Rate Review site includes the average rate increases for each individual carrier, but most of the enrollment data is still redacted.
Texas' annual health insurance rate filings are kind of a mixed bag in terms of transparecy. Hardly any of the carriers have Uniform Rate Review Template (URRT) forms or Rate Filing Justification Form Part II available (these are the documents which generally include the actual number of people enrolled in the policies for each market for that insurance carrier), and the Actuarial Memorandum (Part III) is heavily redacted for most of them, making it very difficult to lock in the actual enrollment numbers.
