The biggest thing they tell us is that, as I suspected when I wrote about the CMS release, the whole bottom of the market is undergoing a fairly massive repricing. In most states, the cost of the cheapest Silver plan, relative to the cheapest one last year, rose even more than the benchmark rate. And in most states, the cost of the cheapest Bronze plan went up by more than the cost of the cheapest Silver plan. (The average increase was 13 percent, but it looks as if it’s unweighted, while the government used a weighted average. As I noted last week, the weighted average is usually the most meaningful national metric, but the unweighted can be revealing as well.) 

That still doesn’t tell us what happened at the top of the market, with the carriage trade splurging on policies that cover nearly everything. But I think there’s one thing we can say for certain: Insurers significantly underestimated how much people would spend on health care, even if they chose stripped-down plans that have narrow provider networks and require consumers to cover a significant portion of their own costs.

Some of this may reflect pent-up demand, if folks who had been putting off treatment for years went out and got all the services they’d been delaying. But the consensus seems to be that the pool is sicker than expected (and that includes unsubsidized folks who are buying insurance off of the exchanges, but form a single actuarial risk pool for the purposes of pricing the insurance). It’s also older; the administration was looking for about 40 percent of exchange enrollment to come from folks 18 to 35, and at the end of the last enrollment period, that number was stubbornly stuck around 28 percent.