The impact of market-focused strategies is diminished by the lack of competition among health insurers in rural areas, Liz Carey reports for The Daily Yonder.
And rural areas are less competitive in the insurance market because of many complex factors – not just population density, the study concluded.
The study could be valuable to policy-maker who need a better understanding of how rural markets work.
The study by the Rural Policy Research Institute for Rural Health Policy Analysis “looked at insurer participation data across three market-based health insurance programs — the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program (FEHBP), Medicare Advantage (MA) and Health Insurance Marketplaces (HIMs – which were created under the Affordable Care Act),” Carey writes.
The researchers wanted to see if competition affected decisions to purchase health insurance.
“The study found that, in areas that had been dominated by a smaller number of insurers in the past, the Affordable Care Act’s health-insurance marketplaces for individual policies had lower enrollment.”
Population density alone does not lower health-insurance enrollment, but an area’s previous lack of competition did predict lower enrollment rates.
Abby Barker, of the Rural Policy Research Institute, told The Daily Yonder:
“I think you could say that population density, and some of those other population-related measures … are expected to be significant. But what we added is this measure of competition that shows that another explanatory factor is how concentrated the market is and has been over time. The methods don’t really identify which is MORE important, but the contribution of this work is to say that prior market concentration matters.
“In my view, it suggests that policies that rely on competition to achieve certain access/affordability goals, really have to be intentional about overcoming this sort of inertia that tends to exist. Once certain insurance issuers are established in a particular geographic region, it’s a little harder for new ones to come in.”
The study by the Rural Policy Research Institute for Rural Health Policy Analysis “looked at insurer participation data across three market-based health insurance programs — the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program (FEHBP), Medicare Advantage (MA) and Health Insurance Marketplaces (HIMs – which were created under the Affordable Care Act),” Carey writes.
The researchers wanted to see if competition affected decisions to purchase health insurance.
“The study found that, in areas that had been dominated by a smaller number of insurers in the past, the Affordable Care Act’s health-insurance marketplaces for individual policies had lower enrollment.”
Population density alone does not lower health-insurance enrollment, but an area’s previous lack of competition did predict lower enrollment rates.
Abby Barker, of the Rural Policy Research Institute, told The Daily Yonder:
“I think you could say that population density, and some of those other population-related measures … are expected to be significant. But what we added is this measure of competition that shows that another explanatory factor is how concentrated the market is and has been over time. The methods don’t really identify which is MORE important, but the contribution of this work is to say that prior market concentration matters.
“In my view, it suggests that policies that rely on competition to achieve certain access/affordability goals, really have to be intentional about overcoming this sort of inertia that tends to exist. Once certain insurance issuers are established in a particular geographic region, it’s a little harder for new ones to come in.”
from The Rural Blog https://ift.tt/2GEeBNN Study identifies a number of complex factors in lack of health-insurance competition in rural America - Entrepreneur Generations
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