The non-Medicare, non-government-subsidized Massachusetts healthcare insurance headcount/cost spiral seems to continue. Here's an attempt to look at the meaningful membership numbers of the leading Massachusetts insurers (all but one of which is a non-profit for those lefty wingnuts who get off on such things):
The state of Massachusetts Department of Healthcare Finance and Policy (DHCFP) stopped providing such information over a year ago and its then most recent information only ran through early 2011.
(Massachusetts price-fixing legislation of August 2012 eliminated the DHCFP. Which came first, the chicken or the egg?).
In the last comprehensive report on the numbers I am trying to recreate on my own, there were just under 4,000,000 Massachusetts residents at the end of 2009 buying private insurance. That was down from about 4,100,000 residents in 2007. The chart above only totals to about 3,300,000 residents. I don't believe the number has deteriorated 20% in the last three years but on the other hand the trend is clearly down.
-- Dennis Byron
Notes:
- Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Massachusetts breaks out Medicare membership from non-Medicare (what it calls commercial) membership
- Harvard's growth appers to be "same store" comparable; Harvard offers a Medigap policy but exited the Medicare Part C market in 2011
- Tufts' numbers are skewed by the Network Health (NH) acquisition but I attempted an adjustment and Tufts did not provide a Medicare vs. non-Medicare breakout (no adjustment attempted)
- Fallon surely had more growth in Medicare than non-Medicare but does not break it out and since its numbers were declining overall and all I wanted to show was trends, I did not attempt an adjustment
- Cigna reportedly exited the Massachusetts market in 2010 and is winding down; if true, its former members surely provided some of the growth for Harvard and Tufts (Blue Cross may not have wanted Cigna's type of business)
- Health New England does not seem to publish details but because of its major impact in Western Massachusetts, I include it; demographically it surely has a large Medicare component and in fact Health New England was one of only 12 Medicare Part C insurance providers in the country in 2012 to offer a 5-star plan (meaning anyone in its service area could upgrade to it outside of open enrollment)
- I did not include Unicare, the Wellpoint-affiliated healthcare insurance company used by many Massachusetts state employees and retirees because of lack of information; its headcount most likely did not grow because state employee headcount did not grow and Unicare would not have accounted for the discrepancy between my 3,300,000 total and the state's three-year-old 4,000,000 total
