As a trained physician, lawyer and business consultant, J.D. Hickey knows about trying to heal sickness – in people and in businesses.
The Atlanta native was recruited to Tennessee from McKinsey & Co. in Washington D.C. when he was just 33 years old to help then Gov. Phil Bredesen fix TennCare, the state’s Medicaid program which was threatening to rob the rest of the state budget. Hickey helped lead controversial reforms that cut the rolls of those eligible for Medicaid benefits in Tennessee but helped state government get program costs under control.
In 2016, five years after being hired to a top job with BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee in Chattanooga, Hickey pushed through another round of difficult changes in BlueCross’s individual health exchange plans to limit ongoing losses for the insurer. Hickey, who became CEO of BlueCross in 2015, is trying to limit losses from the first three years of Obamacare plans the company estimates could approach $500 million.
In response, BlueCross will scale back where it offers individual health exchange policies in 2017 even after raising premiums on those still getting coverage by an average 62 percent. The Chattanooga insurer had debuted its individual health plans under ObamaCare three years ago at some of the lowest rates in the country across all of Tennessee, but Hickey said the population that signed up for those plans turned out to be sicker and more costly than what was forecast.
“On the pricing, we simply got it wrong and we’ve had to make some large changes to try to bring our rates more in line with our medical costs,” Hickey says.