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The insurers that serve users of individual coverage health reimbursement arrangements might be reasonably stable this year.
SureCo, an ICHRA plan administrator, says that the premium increases facing its customers have been only moderately terrible.
The ICHRA plan participants themselves have flowed between insurers and plans in what looks like an orderly fashion, without big, frightening surges of enrollees into underpriced or overly generous plans.
About 84% of the returning ICHRA users have changed plans, up from 64% last year, according to a sales data summary that the firm sent to BenefitsPRO.
But the percentage who have switched to plans from different carriers increased just a little — to 29%, from 27% last year.
What it means: SureCo's individual market snapshot suggests that parts of the U.S. individual market have been performing reasonably well, in spite of the impact of new federal marketing rules and uncertainty about federal individual and health insurance premium subsidies.
That could be a sign that ICHRA plan administrators and sponsors could overcome the current individual market turbulence.
SureCo: SureCo is a Santa Ana, California-based company that focuses on running ICHRA plans for employers with 200 or more employees.
The analysis is based on data for 20,000 of the participants in the ICHRA plans SureCo serves.
SureCo helps the workers with the ICHRAs choose off-exchange plans, meaning that the plans working with the ICHRA users might be different from the plans serving people using HealthCare.gov and other Affordable Care Act public exchange plans to buy individual and family coverage.
Rates: For the SureCo ICHRA plan participants, the average increase in the full list price for the insurance premiums was 14%.
Insurer competition: Aetna, a subsidiary of CVS Health, left the individual market this year, and SureCo worried that displaced Aetna plan enrollees could flood into certain insurers' plans and swamp those insurers with big, unexpected medical bills.
Instead, "no single carrier dominated," SureCo said.
Some insurers reported high year-over-year growth rates, but the top insurer captured only 14.2% of the market, and no single insurer attracted more than 18% of the former Aetna enrollees.
"This smooth transition demonstrates the resilience of a competitive marketplace," SureCo said.
Benefits richness: A new federal rule could make it easier for ICHRA users with bronze-level coverage — coverage that covers about 60% of the value of a standard health benefits package — to use health savings accounts, and bronze plans tend to be cheaper than richer plans.
The share of SureCo ICHRA users choosing bronze plans increased to 25% this year, from 18% last year, but gold plans continued to be the most popular plans: The share of users choosing gold plans fell to 42%, from 46%.
The share choosing mid-level silver plans fell to 33%, from 35%.
About 22% of the returning users chose lower-tier plans, 9% chose higher-tier plans and 69% stuck with the same "metal tier."
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