I just returned from a long-needed vacation to find a flood of approved 2016 individual insurance market premium rates. The deadline for state regulators to approve the rates for ACA-compliant policies for next year was Tuesday, so they've been popping up all over in the news the past couple of days.
With that in mind, I've posted a whole mess of updates over at ACA Signups:
ARKANSAS: Between 4-5% weighted avg. hikes
WASHINGTON: 4.2% weighted avg.
KANSAS: Between 9% - 25% (looks like 23% weighted avg., ouch)
FLORIDA: 9.5% weighted avg. (lower than I expected but higher than requested)
MICHIGAN: 6.5% weighted avg. (lower than expected); 1% for sm. group mkt.
ALASKA: OUCH. 39% weighted average. Yikes.
IDAHO: Between an 8% decrease and a 26% increase; likely around 20% weighted avg.
OK, so what I've done here is to take the overall weighted average 2016 rate increases for the ACA-compliant individual health insurance market for each state (requested in some states, approved in others) and plug those into a spreadsheet. Then, I've further weighted each state's average increase by that state's percentage of the national total, using 3 different criteria: Total Individual Market (as of 2014); ACA Exchange Enrollment Size (as of March 2015); and Total State Population Size (as of 2014). Again, the bold-faced/green states are ones where the 2016 rates have been approved; the rest are still requested only and could change dramatically in some cases.
I used these 3 criteria because there are large demographic differences from one state to another (ie, some have a disproportionately higher number of residents in the individual market, others have a disproportionately lower number of ACA exchange enrollees and so on)...yet as you can see, even with all of that, the weighted average of all three seem to be remarkably close.
Again, some important caveats:
—This only includes 28 states (+DC), making up around 72% of the total U.S. population. The missing states could easily skew the average up or down.
—Many of the states are only partly weighted and include educated guesses/assumptions about the total individual enrollment risk pool size or market share for individual companies.
—Over half of the states have requested rate changes only, not approved ones; the final, approved rates could end up being quite different in some cases.
—If you want to see the number-crunching for the individual states, use the "State" drop-down menu on the right-hand side of the website (or scroll down below the main site to find it if you're using a smartphone). I'm more certain of my estimates for some states than others based on the clarity/completeness of the data, but I'm pretty confident about it overall.
With all that said, as of August 27th, no matter how you slice it, the national weighted average increase for 2016 seems to be somewhere between 11.7% - 12.3%.