In order to address rising health care costs and to continue to provide sustainable insurance for our members, Blue Cross NC will be revising its individual product offerings for 2016. Effective January 1, 2016, our Blue Advantage and Blue Select plans, which offer our broadest provider networks, will no longer be offered to individual health care consumers in the Charlotte and Triangle areas who purchased their plans since January 1, 2014, as a result of the Affordable Care Act.

These changes are not a product discontinuance, as both of these plans will continue to be available to our individual members in all but 16 of North Carolina’s 100 counties. Blue Cross NC will continue to offer health insurance in all 100 North Carolina counties in 2016.

For the approximately 55,000 current Blue Advantage and individual Blue Select members impacted by this change in the counties listed below, they will continue to have access to more affordable health plan options. This change does not impact employer group members on a Blue Select plan (Blue Advantage is only offered to individual health care consumers), nor does it impact Grandfathered or Transitional individual business.

Charlotte and Triangle Individual Members Impacted

Impacted individual members in the Charlotte or Triangle areas will be able to choose a Blue Value® plan option or the Blue Local® plan specific to their area, if available. These members will receive detailed information in their 2016 renewal notices, which will be mailed in October prior to the annual individual open enrollment period in November. The 16 counties are:

Charlotte: Mecklenburg, Cabarrus, Rowan, Stanly, Union and Anson counties

Durham: Durham, Orange, Person, Alamance, Caswell, Chatham and Lee counties

Raleigh: Wake, Johnston and Franklin counties

Individual members may want to consider choosing their area’s Blue Local product, if they wish to continue to see providers at the in-network benefit level who are affiliated with Carolinas Healthcare System in Charlotte, or Duke University Medical Center and WakeMed Health in the Triangle area.

These Blue Value and Blue Local plans are already a popular and affordable choice with nearly 60 percent of our individual customers in the Charlotte and Triangle areas currently enrolled on one of these lower-cost plans that offer a smaller provider network.

Again, Blue Cross NC is taking these steps so that our members can continue to depend on us for their health care needs in the long term. A sustainable future requires that we work together to make health care better by delivering more value to health care consumers.