Insurers are requesting 2020 rate hikes of 7.8 percent and 12 percent for plans offered to Connecticut individuals and small businesses, respectively, regulators announced.
The requests, which impact fully insured health policies both on and off the state’s Affordable Care Act exchange — Access Health CT — aren’t final.
The Connecticut Insurance Department (CID) is expected to review the filings over the coming months, and could ultimately increase, decrease or approve them as is. Its final decisions typically come in September.
This time last year, insurers had asked for average rate increases of 12.3 percent for individual plans and 10.2 percent for small group plans. CID ultimately approved reduced increases of 2.7 percent and 3.1 percent, respectively.
CID said the newly announced 2020 rate filings are impacted by the reinstatement of a mandatory federal health insurer tax.
There was a moratorium last year on the tax, which adds approximately 3 percentage points to each insurance carrier’s rate increase request for 2020, whether their plan is on or off the exchange, CID said.
“Without the approximately 3 percentage point increase resulting from the recently reinstated federally mandated health insurer tax, the proposed increases are lower than last year’s,” CID Commissioner Andrew N. Mais said in a statement Friday afternoon. “In addition to the federal tax, ongoing rising cost of health care is a key driver of health insurance premium rate increase requests.”
In all, 10 insurers submitted to CID a total of 14 rate filings for 2020. Access Health continues on for a fourth consecutive year with two carriers, Anthem and ConnectiCare, offering individual plans. That’s been the case since 2017, when UnitedHealthcare left the exchange and after nonprofit insurer HealthyCT went into receivership.
While the carrier counts for 2020 are the same as last year, there’s been a significant drop-off over the year in the number of lives covered by their plans.
The on-and-off-exchange individual plans currently cover 112,378 people, down nearly 18 percent from 136,381 a year ago, according to data in the filings.
Meanwhile, on-and-off-exchange small group plans cover 129,976 people, down 17 percent from 156,507 last year.
On the small group side, there’s been a growing shift towards self-funded plans, which are not among the fully insured policies regulated by CID.
Self-funded offerings, which used to be the domain of major employers, allow companies to avoid certain costly state and federal coverage mandates, and have become increasingly available to smaller companies.
The Connecticut Business & Industry Association has just begun to shift its focus to self-funded plans on its own private benefits exchange.
