Affordable Care Act marketplace choices are diminishing. An updated Kaiser Family Foundation analysis — requested by The Wall Street Journal — found that 62 percent of 2017 marketplace enrollees will be able to choose from three or more insurers, down from 85 percent in 2016.
And approximately 1.7 million enrollees living in urban counties will face single insurer marketplaces next year, or about 15 percent of all enrollees in urban counties. This is up from 2 percent in 2016.
The thinning marketplace is pressuring federal regulators to stabilize the system, lower costs for consumers and reduce risks for insurers, reports USA Today.
CMS' recently proposed HHS Notice of Benefit and Payment Parameters for 2018 included recalibrating its risk adjustment models and creating a high-cost enrollee risk pool, in which an adjustment to insurers' transfers would finance 60 percent of costs when individual costs top $2 million.
"The focus of this rule is clearly stabilizing the market," Elizabeth Carpenter, senior vice president at Washington, D.C.-based healthcare consulting firm Avalere, told Becker's Hospital Review. "It focuses less on benefit issues that are directly impacting consumers."
Moving forward, federal officials still must make changes to the ACA amid fierce partisan opposition to the health law, according to USA Today. In other words, solutions requiring Congressional action before the November elections is not expected, the report states.
"This is probably the most frustrating public policy dilemma we’ve got right now in the country," Wayne Goodwin, North Carolina's Democratic insurance commissioner, told USA Today. "Businesses and health insurance companies have invested so much into the ACA, there is a tremendous urgency to having Congress and whoever the new president is fix the law."
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