Coventry plans 23% health-insurance premium increase

About 37,000 Iowans who buy Coventry health insurance could face premium increases averaging 23 percent next year.

That’s the amount the insurer has proposed raising rates on most Iowans who buy their own Coventry coverage instead of obtaining it via their employers. The proposal comes on the heels of an announcement earlier this month that Wellmark Blue Cross & Blue Shield intends to increase premiums 38 percent to 43 percent for about 30,000 Iowans who buy individual policies issued in recent years.

Customers are expressing outrage on the website of the Iowa Insurance Division, which must decide whether to approve the proposed increases.

“I can’t do $800 a month. That’s more than I make. I’m self-employed. You’re killing me,” a Coventry customer wrote.

“Who can afford this?” wrote another. “It is disastrous. People have got to be raising hell about this, it’s unsustainable.”

Insurance Commissioner Nick Gerhart has scheduled a July 23 hearing. Such hearings have drawn emotional testimony in past years. But the insurance division has approved most past health-insurance rate requests after independent experts confirmed they were justified by costs of care.

Several recent commenters on the insurance division’s website questioned whether their opinions mattered. “I can only pray that for once, the Iowa insurance commissioner will understand that there just is NOT any money left in our pockets for yet ANOTHER increase!” a Wellmark customer wrote.

Several questioned why the Affordable Care Act hasn’t kept a lid on such prices.

Coventry is the most popular option this year for Iowans who want to buy policies that qualify for subsidies under the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. Many of those customers would not face the full effect of the premium increase, because their subsidies would increase to help pay it. Wellmark, which dominates the state’s health insurance market, has declined in the past to offer policies that qualify for such subsidies, but it has decided to do so for 2017 in 47 of the state’s 99 counties.

Coventry was purchased in 2013 by the national insurance company Aetna. Many Iowans who have Coventry policies will see them relabeled as Aetna coverage for 2017, company spokesman Rohan Hutchings said Thursday.

The company’s proposal says the rate increases are necessary because of increased prices for drugs and medical services and more use of health care than was expected. The company also cites the fact that an Affordable Care Act measure designed to cushion insurance companies’ exposure to risk is ending in 2017.

Hutchings said that even with the proposed premium increases, Coventry should be the least expensive insurance option for many Iowans who buy their own policies.

A few hundred Council Bluffs area residents who buy Coventry HMO policies could see increases averaging 37 percent, Hutchings said, but 98 percent of the company's Iowa customers would see increases averaging 23 percent, depending on factors such as where they live, whether they smoke and how old they are.