It’s Too Soon to Go Negative on Health Reform’s Marketplaces

Moody’s recently changed its outlook for health insurers from stable to negative, based in part on concerns about whether enough young, healthy people are enrolling in plans through the new health insurance marketplaces (also known as exchanges) under health reform.

This announcement by the well-known credit rating agency stoked another round of fretting about the marketplaces’ viability.  But it’s far too early to draw conclusions about the marketplaces.

Moody’s based its industry outlook in part on the mix of the insurance risk pool:  whether enough people with lower health costs will join, balancing out the higher costs of those with greater health needs.  But the data that will answer this question is still being generated, as we have explained — and it’s far more individualized per company than the rating agency’s sweeping, industry-wide generalization.

And although Moody’s cited a concern that that enrollment of younger people is lagging, the health status of enrollees is far more important to the risk pool’s balance than their age.

Risk pooling occurs within each state and on an insurer-by-insurer basis.  How any given insurance company that offers marketplace plans will fare depends substantially on how accurately it predicted who would enroll in its plans and the costs they would incur.  (WellPoint, one of the major Blue Cross and Blue Shield insurers, has highlighted this, saying that its preliminary analysis of who is enrolling in its plans is tracking with its assumptions when it set its marketplace premiums.)

Moody’s said several issues contributed to its negative outlook for the insurance industry.  For example, it said the Obama Administration’s recent decisions to allow people more time to enroll for 2014 and to keep policies that don’t comply with all the 2014 standards may add more risk than it previously expected for insurers this year.  But another factor that Moody’s raised is older news:  the coming announcement of reduced Medicare Advantage payments for 2015, which merely involves implementation of scheduled cuts enacted under health reform.  Moody’s assessment of the health insurance industry should have already factored in those cuts.

Amid the speculation about the impact that health reform will have on private insurance markets, it will take time to understand what is happening in this first year of implementation.  It’s far too early to declare that the news is bad.