The rate stuff
Three
The health system says it's being unfairly targeted and was just being a good corporate citizen, stepping up to prevent vulnerable Virginians from losing health care coverage.
After three years, a federal civil investigation has yet to determine who's right.
On
A self-employed creator of traffic apps for the cities of
Instead, Dixon learned his premiums for 2018 were going to shoot up to more than
"I remember just being enraged and running out of my home office and into the living room and turning the TV on because I thought, 'This is massive news. This is probably all over the country. This is surely on
Within weeks, Dixon created a
Founded in 1888 as a small medical facility that evolved into
In their quest to understand how and why Optima's 2018 premiums had increased so sharply, Dixon, Quist and Stovall pored over the dense mathematical calculations and federal and state policies that control insurance rates. They gave interviews to
"We just figured we had to get this in front of the right person," says Stovall.
Subsequently, in 2021, the
The investigation was made public in
While such investigations may lead to a formal civil action or ultimately be dropped without further action, the
In court filings and public statements, the health care system denies all allegations and portrays itself as a good corporate citizen that stepped up during a politically volatile time to prevent vulnerable Virginians from losing health insurance coverage. Sentara cites multiple vettings by the
Sentara's court filing also accuses the government of misusing the False Claims Act to "either bully Sentara into a settlement or to harm Sentara's public reputation."
Despite Sentara's explanations and a corroborating letter from the
"No other actuary facing the same market conditions that these guys faced came up with rates close to what Optima did," Quist says, citing data from the
Market chaos
Even after an iconic thumbs-down vote from the late Sen.
"The biggest issues were that there were protections — guardrails if you will — that were put into the ACA to protect the insurance companies from excess risk," says
One of those guardrails was the individual mandate and another was the federal reimbursements the government had been paying to insurance companies to mitigate the risk of expanding coverage. Despite that federal support, large health insurance companies had been hemorrhaging money as they tried to figure out how to price premiums for a new and unknown pool of customers in the ACA market, including small business owners and others who weren't able to secure affordable insurance through other means.
Medicaid expansion wouldn't be implemented in
"A lot of insurance companies decided that was more risk than they were willing to take," Riley said. "That's why you see
In 2017,
Also in 2017, citing similar financial concerns and market volatility,
So, for a brief time in 2017, it appeared that some 350,000 Virginians across 48 counties and 15 cities might have no access to ACA-compliant health insurance the following year. Faced with a looming health care disaster, regulators and elected federal and state officials, including then-
McAuliffe "got on the phone and said, 'You've got to come back into these markets,'" recalls former state Del.
Sentara's mission is, "We improve health every day," and that, according to a statement from company spokesperson
"As the only option in some markets, Sentara assumed all the risk of insuring a larger and potentially more vulnerable population instead of sharing the risk with competitors," Kafka says.
Sentara agreed to offer coverage in markets where it operates facilities and rushed to formulate rates, taking 26 days to do what would normally take six months or more. Those rates, according to Kafka's statement, were certified, as required under federal law, by
In
"While this is not the outcome we had hoped, it will allow us to continue to serve 80% of our existing members and provide an option for another 70,000 Virginians who are losing their current insurance plan," former Optima Health President
Sentara's premiums in the
When Optima CEO Dudley claimed in a
"There is a problem here, but it's not
Complicated business
Determining insurance premiums has always been a complex process, and the ACA added new requirements for insurers including restricting which factors may be used in setting rates.
Quist, Dixon and Stovall say they found reason for concern about how Sentara set its rates as they dug into the data. The first sign something was wrong, they say, was in the area rate factor (ARF) the company had applied to the
When Optima first filed its
"If, for some reason,
In fall 2017, Quist and Stovall found alternatives to Optima. Quist signed up for a non-ACA catastrophic health insurance policy to cover his family in 2018. Stovall managed to get 2018 coverage through a small group plan her employer agreed to offer. Dixon says that to qualify for an Optima small group plan, he'd been forced to hire an employee he didn't need.
In the process of sorting through their options, they noticed that Optima had applied an ARF of just 0.93 for small group plan premiums, meaning Sentara expected to pay lower than average prices for small group medical expenses in
"That … was like alarm bells are going off," Quist says, noting that individual members and small group members would be utilizing the same providers and therefore should be charged the same amount for services.
However, Sentara and others, including the state insurance bureau, have disagreed, saying that comparing small group premiums with the ACA market is not an apples-to-apples comparison.
"The risk and market conditions in 2016 were very different than in 2018 for Optima and the insurance industry as a whole," Kafka says in a statement. "This was true for the small group and individual markets, which also have different sets of rules and risks associated with them, leading to variations in costs between the two markets. The BOI approved Optima's rates for both years' ARFs, conducted an additional review and reaffirmed that the rates in both markets were 'justified.'"
In a
The pair considered turning the invitation down, assuming it was a PR move on the company's part, "and then we got to talking and decided, 'Well, we could bring Karl,'" laughs Stovall, who calls Quist their "secret weapon." A 52-year-old
"I am a very analytical person, and this was also very personal to me," says Quist. "A 20% increase on a thousand-dollar premium is
On
The next day, Dixon, Quist and Stovall met with Sentara execs in
"We knew that this area factor could not be right, that there was this discrepancy with the small group market," says Quist. They'd also reviewed other insurers' filings in
Dixon, Quist and Stovall say that Sentara execs seemed reluctant to blame
"The whole premise of the Affordable Care Act is pooling risk," Quist says. "It's putting all individuals into one big risk pool so that if you live in
The meeting with the Optima executives ended on a confrontational note, recalls Quist: "I said, 'Well, we know what the rules are around setting area factors, and the regulation says that you can use this and this, and you cannot use morbidity. And what you've described is against the law.'"
Sentara provided a statement saying, "Optima complied with all applicable state and federal requirements when creating regional rates. Therefore, this means Optima did not use morbidity in creating the rating factor for the
The health system also points to an
Optima's ARF was driven chiefly by higher reimbursement rates paid to area hospitals and provider groups, White wrote, noting that utilization of health care services is higher in
"Specifically, the information reviewed by the Bureau shows that Optima adjusted for risk adjustment transfer payments to ensure that the impact of morbidity was removed from experience, as required by federal law," the letter states.
White's letter also defends the difference in Optima's individual and small group plan ARFs, noting that Optima maintained a lower rate for small group plans to avoid disrupting a stable market.
"In contrast, the individual market already had experienced such a disruption following carrier exits from that market, which led to Optima adopting a different approach than in the small group market," he wrote.
But over the next few months, the three
"Milliman has not demonstrated that differences in morbidity have been removed from the Milliman HealthCare Cost Guidelines (HCGs)," wrote BOI Chief Insurance Market Examiner
In fact, while studying the documents, Dixon had spotted something curious about the certification of Optima's 2018 rates signed by a Milliman actuary: a slight change in the specific certification language prescribed by the ACA.
"What it was supposed to say is the rates only reflect differences in provider prices and provider practice patterns and do not reflect differences in morbidity," Stovall says. "They removed the word 'only.'"
A complaint they filed against the Milliman actuary with the
And Grissom's 2019 BOI rate filing note defends Milliman, saying, "It doesn't appear that the actuary signing the certification did so with the intent to mislead … as they believe that they had provided sufficient documentation demonstrating that morbidity was removed in developing the area rate factors."
Milliman and the
In addition to their complaints to the
In
"The decision not to submit its most competitive rates by the
the filing date." (An SCC spokesperson declined comment, instead referring a reporter to public filings on the SCC website.)
In a court document, Sentara acknowledges the premiums for 2018 ended up higher than necessary in part because some of the changes the company feared at the federal level failed to materialize.
"[Sentara] found its conservative actuarial assumptions resulted in unexpected and excess profits," the court filing explains. That document also notes that Optima returned
In the court filing, Sentara acknowledges that
"The government is alleging Optima inflated projected claims, which inflated premiums they were approved for, which, in turn, inflated the subsidies they received," says Dixon.
What's next?
In court filings, Sentara has successfully fought to keep many details of the "underlying matter" of the investigation under seal. The underlying matter in any False Claims Act investigation is a whistleblower complaint, explains
False Claims Act complaints are usually — but not always — brought by former employees, Heaphy says, but "it could be a competitor. It could be people that have done some of their own investigation and research, like ratepayers or health insurance customers."
Now a partner with
In a statement, Sentara says it has turned over to the
In a court filing, the health system accuses the government of using a "novel theory of liability under the ACA" to initiate its False Claims Act investigation and says federal investigators have refused to answer Sentara's questions about the legal basis for the investigation even as the
A
Despite the company's assertions, in March, nine months after that letter was sent, the court ordered two Sentara executives to provide additional testimony. There have been no additional details about the investigation publicly released since that time.
Sentara spokesperson Kafka reasserts that the company has done nothing wrong. "As it has for more than three years," he says in a statement, "Sentara will continue to operate in good faith and looks forward to a resolution of this matter."
Furthermore, he says, "The last thing Sentara wanted was to be the only insurer in the market because that meant shouldering 100% of the risk for covering the community. Sentara's rates were adjusted to reflect this reality and were reviewed by outside actuarial experts and approved twice by the
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