Individual Market’s Growing Pains Hit Unsubsidized Hardest

Oct 16
Oct 16, 2020

To the Trump administration, a recently released report on individual insurance market enrollment demonstrates that “people who do not qualify for subsidies continue to be priced out of the market.” Indeed, between plan years 2016 to 2019, unsubsidized enrollment both on and off the Affordable Care Act exchanges declined by 2.8 million people, representing a 45% drop nationally.

The reason behind those trends — as the administration suggested — is chiefly high costs, according to one policy expert. But the forces that drove individual market premium changes to spike so much are a bit more complicated, and they illustrate just how much change the market has undergone since the ACA’s inception.
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Leslie Small

Leslie has been working in journalism since 2009 and reporting on the health care industry since 2014. She has covered the many ups and downs of the Affordable Care Act exchanges, the failed health insurer mega-mergers, and hundreds of other storylines spanning subjects such as Medicaid managed care, Medicare Advantage, employer-sponsored insurance, and prescription drug coverage. As the managing editor of Health Plan Weekly and Radar on Drug Benefits, she writes and edits for both publications while overseeing a small team of reporters who also focus on the managed care sector. Before joining AIS Health, she was a senior editor for the e-newsletter Fierce Health Payer, and she started her career as a copy editor at multiple local newspapers. She graduated with a dual degree in journalism and political science from Penn State University.