PORTLAND — More than 58,000 Oregon health insurance customers have been “orphaned” this year as carriers continue to struggle through the chaos wrought by the Affordable Care Act.
Amid sustained financial losses, insurers are going out of business, leaving Oregon or abandoning entire swaths of the state. Thousands of Oregonians who didn’t get cut loose by their insurers face more double-digit rate hikes.
And it could have been worse: Regence, Providence and Moda, the three largest health insurers in the state, informed regulators this summer of plans to stop serving the individual market – designed for the self-employed and others without access to group plans — in much of the state.
The change would have forced as many as 81,000 insurance customers to find new carriers.
“Central Oregon would have been down to one carrier,” said Pat Allen, director of the Oregon Department of Consumer and Business Services. “Tillamook and Lincoln counties too. We became immediately concerned about that.”