Ohio Residents Rest Easier as New Insurance Providers Bring ACA Exchange Plans To Counties
Pockets of counties across the nation have endured some scares as insurance providers began withdrawing from ACA exchanges, creating limited competition and limited options for coverage. Twenty Ohio counties faced the threat of having zero options for health insurance coverage in 2018 until five insurance providers stepped in to offer coverage to 19 of those counties. Those insurers are Molina Healthcare Inc., CareSource, Centene Corp., Paramount Health Care, and Medical Mutual of Ohio. This welcome news arrived on the heels of the announcement by Anthem that it was leaving the Ohio exchange because of market and political volatility.
The five new insurers will be locked in for 2018. While that is good news, not everyone is out of the woods just yet. One county in Ohio, Paulding County, is still without a provider, although the state is currently working hard to find one.
Ohio was not alone in its situation. States like Missouri, Tennessee, and Washington also had categorically “bare” exchanges with multiple counties having no insurance coverage options in place for 2018. A new Kaiser Family Foundation report indicates that some counties in Nevada currently do not have health insurance options in place for 2018. Insurance companies have until late September to make final decisions about participation in state health insurance exchanges for 2018.
These counties lost their insurance providers on their ACA exchanges due to these insurance providers’ unwillingness to bear the risk of increasing costs. This became particularly acute this year due to the ongoing question of whether the Trump Administration will be making the cost sharing reductions payments and enforcing the individual mandate, both of which are critical to stabilize the insurance markets. In view of this instability, insurance providers left. Now, as the markets are in dire need of coverage options, some new providers are coming to the rescue in some counties. The only hope is that once other providers see a stable exchange, they, too, will return so that all counties are covered.
A quote in The Wall Street Journal from Jillian Froment, director of the Ohio Department of Insurance, summed up the situation for most states: “We will continue working with the industry, but those efforts are heavily dependent on market stability and clarity from Washington. We encourage Congress to work on ways to stabilize our health insurance markets.”
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