Individual Market’s Growing Pains Hit Unsubsidized Hardest With Chart: Individual Market Loses Mostly Unsubsidized Enrollees
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.