State has the nation’s fourth highest insurance premiums, creating a difficult environment for small businesses to thrive.
Minnesota’s Top 5 Ranking Burdens Small Biz
There seems to be no end in sight for Minnesota’s rising premiums, and those high premiums aren’t even the highest in the country.
According to numbers released in October, Minnesota is behind just Tennessee, Oklahoma, and Arizona with the fourth highest premium increase among the 43 states with available data, according to TwinCities.com—Pioneer Press.
The average small group market premium hike will be 9.75 percent in 2017, while the individual market will soar 59 percent, StarTribune reports.
This is a painful reality for Minnesotans, who experienced some of the lowest premiums just a few years ago.
“These rate increases apply to Minnesota’s individual insurance market, which covers about 5 percent of the state’s population.” However, “Most Minnesotans get their coverage from an employer or a government program such as Medicare, MinnesotaCare or Medical Assistance,” TwinCities.com—Pioneer Press reports.
Even Gov. Mark Dayton, “a Democrat who supported the Affordable Care Act that set up the individual health exchanges,” is seeing the flaws in the system.
“Ultimately … the reality is the Affordable Care Act is no longer affordable for an increasing number of people,” Dayton said. “We’re going to need both state and federal governments to step in and do what they need to do to remedy these problems.”
Although there are states with higher premiums than Minnesota, the state situation is dire “because it has an unusually small individual market with an unusually large number of sick people. That means insurers have had to pay more to cover care than they’ve received in premiums, resulting in millions of dollars in losses.”
And the hits keep coming, as Blue Cross Blue Shield was another insurer to pull out of Minnesota’s individual market this year.
NFIB/MN State Director Mike Hickey knows what a catastrophe this is and hopes for extreme change in the future.
“Small employers are not happy with getting the 9.75 percent average increase, and some up to 13 percent, but at least it is nowhere near the crisis level we are seeing in the individual market, which is in desperate need of fixing,” Hickey says.
Hopefully, someone will take these pleas to heart.
