The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Changes in Health Care Financing and Organization (HCFO) initiative hosted a webinar on November 17th, 2015 entitled “Is Rate Review the Answer to Lower Health Insurance Premiums?” The webinar discussed the impact of state-level rate review regulations on health insurance premiums. The Petris Center’s Richard Scheffler and Brent Fulton, and Ann Hollingshead, University of California, Berkeley; and Pinar Karaca-Mandic, University of Minnesota, discussed their recent HCFO-funded work on this first evaluation of state rate review authority in the individual market during the years immediately after the enactment of the ACA, 2010-13, with an emphasis on whether rate regulation, coupled with loss ratio requirements, moderates health insurance premium increases.
Following their presentation, discussants Sabrina Corlette from the Center on Health Insurance Reforms (CHIR) at Georgetown University’s Health Policy Institute and Kevin Beagan from the Health Care Access Bureau in Massachusetts’ Division of Insurance provided their comments on the policy implications of the study. The researchers responded to the participants’ questions during the final 30 minutes of the webinar.
The full webinar can be viewed on AcademyHealth’s website here.
To learn more about the studies, view this HCFO brief here.