covered california
covered california

Covered California health insurance rates increasing in 2023

ANA B. IBARRA

A doctor listens to a man's heart beat at a clinic in July 2019 in Bieber, California.

Premiums for health insurance plans sold through the state marketplace will increase an average of 6% next year, Covered California officials announced today.

This rate hike is the largest California has seen since 2019. In the last three years, insurers had kept average increases under 2%.

Rate changes vary by region — from an 11.7% increase in Imperial, Inyo and Mono counties to zero change in Fresno, Kings, and Madera counties.

Study:Lack of universal health care cost 300,000 American lives in pandemic

When premiums increase, an individual’s financial aid usually does, too. Aid is based on household income, so subsidies may offset some of the increase. But people who don’t qualify for subsidies will bear the full cost of the rate hike.

“Premiums are a capturing of what health care costs are, how they vary across geographies and communities, how health care costs are growing over time, which we know in this country are already too high and rising,” said Jessica Altman, executive director of Covered California.

She noted that California’s rate hike is still lower than it is in other states. A recent Kaiser Family Foundation analysis found a 10% average premium increase proposed by 72 insurers in 13 other states.

The rate increase, Altman said, is largely attributed to people resuming doctor visits and procedures that they were postponed during peaks of the COVID-19 pandemic. There is also the cost of general inflation.

About one percent of the increase, however, is attributed to the potential loss of enhanced subsidies from the federal government, which are set to expire at the end of this year. Without the additional aid, people will pay more for their premiums, likely pushing young, healthy people to drop their coverage. And when healthy people leave the marketplace, premiums go

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US health insurers raise rates to match increase in usage

SACRAMENTO, California (AP) — After putting off routine health care for much of the pandemic, Americans are now returning to doctors’ offices in big numbers — a trend that’s starting to show up in higher insurance rates across the country.

Health insurers in individual marketplaces across 13 states and Washington DC will raise rates an average of 10% next year, according to a review of rate filings by the Kaiser Family Foundation.

That’s a big increase after premiums remained virtually flat for several years during the pandemic as insurers seek to recoup costs for more people using their policies, combined with record-high inflation that is driving up prices for virtually everything, including health care.

The rates review included Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Texas, Vermont and Washington.

“We’re at a point in the pandemic where people are using health care that they may have put off before,” said Larry Levitt, executive vice president for health policy with the Kaiser Family Foundation. “We have a double whammy right now of people using more care and inflation throughout the economy.”

In California, state officials announced Tuesday that rates would increase an average of 6% next year for the 1.7 million people who purchase coverage through Covered California, the state-operated health insurance marketplace. That’s a big jump after years of record low increases, when rate increases averaged about 1% in the past three years.

Increased use of health plans was the biggest reason for the increase, accounting for four percentage points, according to Jessica Altman, executive director of Covered California.

“That is really the consistent message that other states are seeing as well, and even more so than California,” she said.

About 14.5 million people purchased individual health coverage through state marketplaces this year, according to

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