Webinar Recording Now Available - Is Rate Review the Answer to Lower Health Insurance Premiums?

Tuesday, November 17, 2015, 1:00 - 2:30 p.m. EDT

Overview: During the past decade, increases in health insurance premiums have outpaced inflation, particularly in the individual and small group markets, with significant variation among states. The federal rate review regulation in the Affordable Care Act (ACA) requires health insurance carriers to file and publicly justify proposed rate increases of 10 percent or more. States’ regulatory authority over health insurance carriers’ rates takes a variety of forms, including “file and use” and “prior approval.” Post-ACA, insurers must also adhere to requirements for medical loss ratios, the proportion of premium revenues spent on medical claims.

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Changes in Health Care Financing and Organization (HCFO) initiative hosted a webinar that discussed the impact of state-level rate review regulations on health insurance premiums. Richard Scheffler, Brent Fulton, Ann Hollingshead, University of California, Berkeley; and Pinar Karaca-Mandic, University of Minnesota, discussed their recent HCFO-funded work on this first evaluation of state rate review authority in the individual market during the years immediately after the enactment of the ACA, 2010-13, with an emphasis on whether rate regulation, coupled with loss ratio requirements, moderates health insurance premium increases.  Following their presentation, discussants Sabrina Corlette from the Center on Health Insurance Reforms (CHIR) at Georgetown University’s Health Policy Institute and Kevin Beagan from the Health Care Access Bureau in Massachusetts’ Division of Insurance provided their comments on the policy implications of the study. The researchers responded to the participants’ questions during the final 30 minutes of the webinar. If you are interested in learning more about the researchers' study, please check out this HCFO Findings Brief [1].

This presentation is intended to be a professional resource.

This webinar was presented by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Changes in Health Care Financing and Organization (HCFO) initiative.

A recording of the webinar is available here [2].