Anna Wilde Mathews
speaker
275 appearances
5 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2017
last heard Sep 2023
Anna Wilde Mathews’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Well, there is a mix of reasons.
Some of it is, in some cases, that companies are still losing money on the Affordable Care Act exchange plans that they sell in certain states.
But a lot of the increases are due to, or at least partly due to, uncertainty about key questions about the future of the ACA, particularly
certain payments that the Trump administration has threatened to halt.
Well, it's really up in the air.
There are efforts in Congress, some bipartisan groups of senators and representatives who have said they want to pass legislation aimed at stabilizing the exchanges.
If they did that, it would probably bring down premiums maybe even for next year, although time is getting short.
Well, we should say that some of these still could change.
These weren't final numbers we were looking at.
But some of the rate requests that were in the neighborhood of 30% or higher were in Wyoming, South Carolina, and Iowa.
Yes, the Department of Health and Human Services released rate increase request percentages, although, again, these were preliminary requests that may have changed even since then.
There are a number of insurers in a number of states that are seeking 20% or higher, and that's much more common than the higher than 30% figures.
But there are also states where insurers are seeking far smaller increases, though, again...
Because of the uncertainty, some of those insurers looking for limited increases are now refiling and saying, due to the uncertainty, they actually will need a bigger rate hike to build an extra margin for the danger of losing these federal payments.
August 16th, mid-August, they have a federal deadline.
Although...
I have to say, in the past, there have been instances where the federal government has granted some flexibility around deadlines when states and insurers were dealing with a lot of uncertainty.
So although that is the deadline, and I'm not aware that it has been waived, there are already a couple of states where I think there have been some extensions granted.
Well, we should make sure that people understand that these rates we're talking about are only on the plans sold under the Affordable Care Act, typically through the exchanges established by the Affordable Care Act.
We're not talking about a plan that you get through your employer, and we're not talking about a plan that you might buy to cover your small business employees or yourself as a small business owner.
Showing 241–260 of 275 · page 13 of 14
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