Individual Major Medical Plans Could Still Exist in 2019: Actuary

He estimates that:

• The underlying level of medical cost inflation could range from 6% to 8%.
• The move by Congress to eliminate the Affordable Care Act penalty for people who fail to have solid major medical coverage could add 7.5 percentage points to 2019 rate increases.
• The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act reduction in the corporate income tax rate could cut typical increases by at least 0.5 percentage points.
• The elimination of the ACA health insurer fee could reduce rate increases by 2 percentage points.

All of those factors combined could lead to add about 3.5% to 13% to 2019 rate increases, on top of whatever changes insurers seek as a result of the nature of their own enrollees and their own markets, according to ThinkAdvisor Life/Health calculations based on Dillon's figures.

In an email, Dillon said many individual major medical issuers did better in 2017 than in 2016.

"At this time, it appears that there will still be many individual major medical products available in 2019," Dillon said.

Issuers' solid 2017 performance "should help bring some stability to the markets and could produce slightly lower rate increases than [in] 2018," Dillon said. "The 2019 rate increases will primarily be driven by claims cost trend and the impact of the non-funding of the [ACA] cost-sharing reduction program."

The ACA cost-sharing reduction program provides subsidies that help ACA exchange plan users with household income below 250% of the federal poverty level pay health plan deductibles, co-payments and coinsurance amounts.

The administration of President Donald Trump stopped making cost-sharing reduction program subsidy payments to insurers in October 2017, after concluding that the administration lacked authorization from Congress to make the payments.

— Read ACA World 2017: Rates might not be THAT bad on ThinkAdvisor.

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