while insurer financial performance declined slightly from the first quarter of 2018 to 2019, margins were still higher than all other previous years through 2017. (Photo: Shutterstock)

Despite dire predictions that the Trump Administration's policy changes would collapse the Affordable Care Act exchanges, the ACA-compliant individual insurance market continues to be stable – and insurers are generally profitable, according to an analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation.

“One concern about the effective repeal of the individual mandate that took effect for 2019, along with the expansion of short-term plans, was whether healthy enrollees would drop out of the market in large numbers,” the authors write. “The still-modest growth in claims costs during the first three months of 2019 suggests that these policy changes did not cause as many healthy enrollees to leave the individual market as was feared.”

Moreover, many insurers on average continue to make a profit in the individual insurance market, according the KFF's analysis of financial data reported by insurance companies through the first quarter of this year.