Alaska’s Health Insurance Plan Could Be Hard to Copy June 05, 2017 Obamacare’s New Frontier – CQ Magazine CQ Magazine quoted Manatt’s Joel Ario, a managing director with Manatt Health, for an article on how Alaska was able to keep its health insurance premiums low at a time when nearly every state was seeing their ACA rates jump. The publication reports that Alaska successfully put in place a program designed to prevent the state’s only remaining ACA insurer from raising its rates by 42 percent, one of the highest projected hikes in the country. When the decision was made by the state’s Blue Cross Blue Shield plan to raise its rates by only seven percent, other states took notice. However, it may be difficult for other states to replicate Alaska’s plan, as Ario explained to CQ Magazine. “There’s definitely a lot of interest in other states, but almost every time, you get hung up when you mention that the funding has to come from somewhere, like a tax on all premiums,” said Ario. “It’s hard to make that work. It’s hard for a lot of people to get beyond that.”
