Last week when I wrote about the relationship between health care premiums and obesity rates, a number of people both on BenefitsPro and in person mentioned to me how premiums are much more a function of claims paid than of the relative health of the participants.

Of course, there is a relationship between premiums and health, but as we saw last week it's one that's unexpectedly not inverse.

This week I took a look at whether premiums can be used to predict claims. Unfortunately, claims paid are only required to be reported on health policies that use experience related contracts, which represent a very small minority (around 7 percent) of health plans filed. More on this shortcoming of the 5500 next week.

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