Remaining insurers likely to raise rates
Uncertainty has many companies exiting exchanges.
Early moves by insurers suggest that another round of price hikes and limited choices will greet insurance shoppers around the country when they start searching for next year’s coverage on the public markets established by the Affordable Care Act.
Insurance companies are still making decisions about whether to offer coverage for individuals next year on these markets, and price increase requests are only just starting to be revealed by state regulators. But in recent weeks big insurers like Aetna and Humana have been dropping out of markets or saying that they aren’t ready to commit. And regulators in Virginia and Maryland have reported early price hike requests ranging from just under 10 percent to more than 50 percent.
Increases like that will probably be seen in other states, too, as insurers set prices to account for uncertain support from a federal government led by a new president who wants to scrap and replace the law, said Sabrina Corlette, a research professor at Georgetown Health Policy Institute.
With the latest departures, more than 40 percent of U.S. counties would have only one insurer selling coverage on their marketplaces for next year. That assumes no other insurers leave and none step in by the time customers start shopping for coverage in the fall.
These state-based marketplaces, known as exchanges, were established by the Affordable Care Act as a place for customers to compare prices and buy coverage, often with help from incomebased tax credits.
The idea was that competition for customers would keep prices low. But insurers faced big losses in some markets, and they got less financial support from the government than they expected. They’ve been raising prices and pulling out of some markets altogether in response.
When insurers leave, prices rise. The median coverage price this year for one typical plan was about 67 percent higher in marketplaces with one insurer compared with those that had six or more, according to a study by the nonprofit Urban Institute.
Insurers are now also concerned about the uncertain future of the Affordable Care Act, as Republicans in Congress hash out a plan to replace the law and President Donald Trump predicts the demise of the law and its exchanges.
“Everything might be worse everywhere,” said Katherine Hempstead, a senior adviser with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which studies the Obama-era health system and health care issues.
The nation’s third-largest insurer, Aetna, said Wednesday that it will completely leave the exchanges for 2018 after projecting a $200 million loss for this year. It joins Humana, which said earlier this year that it would abandon selling that kind of coverage, a decision that temporarily left 16 Tennessee counties with no individual Affordable Care Act options for 2018.
Customers won’t know for several more months for sure what their options are for next year. For now, eight states appear to be down to one insurer: Alaska, Alabama, Delaware, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Wyoming.