Analysts: Off-exchange health market needs windows

Analysts are wishing they had better information about what’s happening in the individual health insurance market outside of the public exchange system. 

See also: CDC finds weakness in off-exchange health enrollment

Joel Ario, a health compliance specialist at Manatt Health Solutions, and Katherine Hempstead, an analyst at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, talked about the off-exchange market data gap at the winter meeting of the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC).

The NAIC’s Health Insurance and Managed Care Committee included a summary of Ario and Hempstead’s remarks, which took place at a committee session in November 2015, in a packet of materials for the NAIC’s upcoming spring meeting in New Orleans. The committee is preparing to hold a session at the meeting on Monday.

During the winter meeting session, Ario and Hempstead talked about their efforts to develop public, relatively easy-to-use data sets with information on individual PPACA exchange plans.

Ario and Hempstead reported that they are unable to create similar data sets for the off-exchange individual market, even though this market is larger than the individual exchange market in many states.