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October 31, 2016 at 01:52 PM
The individual major medical coverage open enrollment period for 2017 starts tomorrow.
Many dark clouds hang overhead.
Many big insurers have already backed away from the individual major medical market and are preparing to “reduce their footprint” in the market even further in the coming year.
Related: Aetna exec sees ACA risk-adjustment death spiral
Indianapolis-based Anthem is staying in the market, but it’s showing little enthusiasm for acquiring large amount of new individual medical business.
Even Molina Healthcare, a Long Beach, California-based insurer that got its start in the Medicaid market and has top executives who see serving low-income and moderate-income ACA exchange users as part of the company’s core mission, said last week that a key ACA risk-management program, a risk-adjustment program that’s supposed to use cash from individual issuers with low-risk enrollees to help issuers with high-risk enrollees, is killing its exchange unit, by shifting about 25 percent of the unit’s revenue to competitors.
Related: ACA risk adjustment eats 25 percent of Molina exchange revenue
But there are some signs individual commercial health sales could be strong, whether issuers want the business or not.
At press time, Google Trends, a Google system that measures the volume of search activity for popular keywords, showed that search activity for “HealthCare.gov” stood at 5 percent of the 5-year peak level, up from 4 percent of the five-year peak a year ago.
Search activity for “buy health insurance” stood at 44 percent of the five-year peak, up from 35 percent a year ago.
