Nonprofit health insurers may tend to use a different individual health insurance pricing strategy than for-profit issuers.
Jesse Geneson, an analyst at HealthPocket, has published data on issuers’ individual plan pricing strategies in an analysis of plan price data from counties in states that use the HealthCare.gov Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) exchange enrollment system.
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Geneson compared the strategies of for-profit and nonprofit issuers by looking at counties in which for-profit issuers are competing with nonprofit issuers, and getting the price and issuer type for the cheapest plans in those counties.
Geneson did not try to distinguish between smaller nonprofit carriers and big nonprofit players like Health Care Service Corp.
Nonprofit carriers issue about 46 percent of all HealthCare.gov plans, and for-profit carriers issue 54 percent.
Geneson found that, overall, nonprofit carriers have the cheapest silver plans in 1,072 or 58 percent, of the 1,841 counties in which both nonprofit carriers and for-profit carriers offer silver-level plans.