Blue Cross and Blue Shield Insurance of North Carolina will no longer offer grandfathered healthcare plans as of 2018.
The change will affect 50,000 North Carolinians with grandfathered plans, which means they went into effect before the Affordable Care Act was signed into law.
Student Blue health insurance coverage will not be affected by these changes, according to an email from Lew Borman, a spokesperson for Blue Cross Blue Shield.
Customers affected will be notified by mail in October.
In a blog post about the decision, Gary Bolt, BCBS vice president of sales and marketing, wrote that BCBS will help connect users to Affordable Care Act plans comparable to their existing plans with BCBS.
BCBS customers who held plans before the signing of the Affordable Care Act were able to keep those plans rather than switching to ACA coverage.
Bolt wrote that the decision came from the number of customers dropping their grandfathered plans and the growing expense of insuring an increasingly elderly population.
In 2010, grandfathered plans covered over 330,000 BCBS customers, but the number has decreased each year since.
Bolt wrote that in order to be able to keep offering the plans in 2018, rates would have to increase significantly to compensate for the lower number of policy holders and the rising cost of providing care to those still covered.