Here’s happier news on risk-corridor results from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
As this HealthAffairs piece notes, “In many states, some insurers did not project premium rates at sufficient levels to account for the risk of the newly insured population. Thus, there were insufficient risk corridor ‘payables’ available from conservatively priced plans to cover all risk corridor ‘receivables’ for underpriced plans to compensate for risk corridor-eligible losses.
“However, this phenomena is highly state-specific. In contrast to most of the country, Covered California, California’s health insurance exchange, had much greater success enrolling a diverse population and did not have a market that allowed the continuation of low-risk, remaining ‘transitional’ plans once the ACA {Affordable Care Act} was implemented. As a result, the health risk scores of enrollees for individual plans in the exchange have stabilized in the second year (regressed to the mean), with risk being more evenly distributed across all of the plans.”
