Following up on a comment on an earlier post and based on the information here (Excel spreadsheet), if all of the insurance carriers that have announced or threatened to withdraw from offering plans in Illinois on the healthcare exchanges (Aetna, BCBS, Humana, Land of Lincoln), none of Illinois’s counties will have no insurance carriers but 27 will have only one. They are:
Alexander
Clay
Franklin
Gallatin
Hamilton
Hardin
Jackson
Jefferson
Johnson
Lake
Lawrence
Madison
Marion
Massac
McDonough
McHenry
Monroe
Perry
Pope
Pulaski
Saline
Schuyler
St. Clair
Union
Wayne
White
Williamson
Most of those counties are small and rural but two (Lake and McHenry) are essentially suburban Chicago and one (St. Clair) is essentially suburban St. Louis.
Update
Jefferson and Johnson Counties added per comments.
Looks like you might have missed two counties: Jefferson and Johnson.
Not that I’m checking your work, I just mapped out the counties to get some perspective on their location and found it odd that Johnson was surrounded by potential one-provider counties and checked a few.
What the map shows is that potential one county providers tend to be in the more distant portions of a metropolitan statistical area (Chicago or St. Louis) (5), or around a remote regional state university (WIU) (2), or in an intensely rural area, often with the largest cities in neighboring states (Little Egypt) (20).
I believe the answers PD is looking for are: 1) must buy from exchange? Yes, and 2) percent of counties nationwide with only one provider – 24.
The unasked question – how will this be fixed? It won’t. Adverse selection bias is political suicide, especially to the young population flat broke anyway. To coin a phrase: “This is a big effing deal.”
Of course I hear a government single payer system is in the works, along with a single payer system for clothing, steel, cell phones, food……
IMO, the PPACA was a controversial but only momentary tributary to an eventual single payer system. Once the former failed, the calculation was that a natural governmental glide path was to propagate (with less resistance) a universal health care kind of program.
Barriers to entrance are high for heath insurance.
Steve