People with individual health coverage used more health care in the third quarter of 2014, and people with group coverage used less.

Katherine Hempstead, an analyst at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, is reporting that finding in an analysis of insurer data from the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC). Hempstead compared care utilization data for the individual market and the group market for 2013 and 2014.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) has set up the public exchange system and exchange plan premium subsidies. Other parts of the law have all but eliminated medical underwriting in the individual health insurance market.

Even in the third quarter of 2014, many patients still had coverage written under the rules in effect before Jan. 1, 2014, when exchange plan coverage came to life and the major PPACA underwriting rules took effect. But, by July 1, 2014, PPACA World might have started to gel. Health care providers and insurers may have gotten past the stage of doing whatever they could, however they could, just to keep the health care system going.

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Jeffrey R. Ungvary President