Short-Term Health May Go Major

Ten years ago, insurers often sold short-term health insurance policies with annual benefits caps under $50,000.

Today, market forces are pushing the typical annual benefits cap over $500,000, and a Republican state legislator from Indiana is backing a short-term health insurance model law that could set the minimum annual benefits cap at a higher level.

(Related: HealthCare Inc. Adds Rich Short-Term Health Policy)

The Health Insurance & Long Term Care Issues Committee, an arm of the National Council of Insurance Legislators (NCOIL), has given outsiders a peek into the evolution of short-term health insurance coverage in draft minutes for a session that took place in July, at an NCOIL meeting in Newport Beach, California.

The committee put the draft minutes in its part of the document packet for NCOIL’s upcoming annual meeting in Austin, Texas.

Short-term health insurance policies are in the news partly because the administration of President Donald Trump has proposed letting the policies stay in effect for up to 364 days per year, be renewable for up to three years in states that allow that, and be presented as an affordable alternative to individual and family major medical policies that comply with the Affordable Care Act benefits, pricing and underwriting rules.

The ACA exempts short-term health insurance from those rules.

NCOIL is a group for state-level lawmakers with an interest in insurance. It has no ability to set insurance laws itself, but state lawmakers may use NCOIL models to draft their own proposals.

Indiana state Rep. Martin Carbaugh, R-Fort Wayne, Ind., has sponsored a Short Term Limited Duration Insurance Model Act draft that would:

• Set the minimum annual policy limit at $2 million or higher.
• Allow underwriting only when a policy is first purchased, not when a policy comes up for renewal.
• Require a policy to cover hospitalization, ambulatory patient services, emergency services and laboratory services.
• Establish provider network adequacy standards for plans with provider networks.
• Require the issuer to inform a purchaser about the purchaser’s opportunity to participate in the next Affordable Care Act open enrollment period for individual major medical coverage.
• Prohibit an issuer from basing the price of the coverage on an individual’s health.

An insurer could use medical underwriting when it was deciding whether to issue a policy, and it could exclude coverage for preexisting conditions.

Carbaugh is a financial planner who belongs to the National Association of Insurance and Financial Advisors, according to his official biography.

The model law draft is similar to a bill Carbaugh authored and passed in Indiana, according to the draft minutes from the July meeting.

Jan Dubauskas, senior counsel at Health Insurance Innovations Inc., an insurance brokerage firm that has been selling short-term health insurance for years, said she thinks brokers would like to see more benefits and disclosure requirement standardization, to protect consumers and ease the difficulty of complying with different states’ rules, according to the draft minutes.

Dubauaskas said the typical annual benefits maximum today is about $500,000 to $1 million.