We identified the most and least expensive insurance regions in the first year of the Affordable Care Act’s new marketplaces. We discovered that the rates in Colorado Mountain resort counties were higher than anywhere else in the country. We also visited one of the most expensive regions, in rural Georgia, and one of the least expensive, in eastern Tennessee, to show how monopoly pricing power–of a hospital system in Georgia and an insurer in Tennessee–is the major determinant of premium costs.
