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ObamaCare Crumbles As Health Insurers Pull Out
ObamaCare Crumbles As Health Insurers Pull Out (Image: NRCC)
- UnitedHealth, the nation's largest health insurer, announced that it will be pulling out of ObamaCare.
- In the past two years, UnitedHealth has lost over $1 billion from its business exchange with ObamaCare.
- The health insurer will only take part in ObamaCare in a handful of states.
The nation’s largest health insurer, fearing massive financial losses, announced Tuesday that it plans to pull back from ObamaCare in a big way and cut its participation in the program’s insurance exchanges to just a handful of states next year – in the latest sign of instability in the marketplace under the law.
UnitedHealth CEO Stephen Hemsley said the company expects losses from its exchange business to total more than $1 billion for this year and last.
Despite the company expanding to nearly three dozen state exchanges for this year, Hemsley said the company cannot continue to broadly serve the market created by the Affordable Care Act's coverage expansion due partly to the higher risk that comes with its customers.
UnitedHealth has already decided to pull out of Arkansas, Georgia, and Michigan in 2017, and Hemsley told analysts during a Tuesday morning conference call that his company will not carry financial exposure from the exchanges into 2017.
“We continue to remain an advocate for more stable and sustainable approaches to serving this market,” he said.
The state-based exchanges are a key element behind the Affordable Care Act's push to expand insurance coverage. But insurers have struggled with higher-than-expected claims from that business.
A recent study by the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association detailed how many new customers nationwide under ObamaCare are higher-risk. It found new enrollees in individual health plans in 2014 and 2015 had higher rates of hypertension, diabetes, depression, coronary artery disease, HIV and Hepatitis C than those enrolled before ObamaCare.
On the heels of Tuesday's announcement, Sen. Ben Sasse, R-Neb., said in a statement it’s a sign of “the President’s broken promise that families would have more choices under ObamaCare.”
The Kaiser Family Foundation, in an analysis on the prospect of United's exit, said “the effect on insurer competition could be significant in some markets – particularly in rural areas and southern states” if it is not replaced.
In the most extreme scenario, “If United were to leave the exchange market overall, 1.8 million Marketplace enrollees would be left with two insurers, and another 1.1 million would be left with one insurer as a result of the withdrawal,” the analysis said.
UnitedHealth had moved slowly into the newly created market by participating in only four exchanges in their first year, 2014. But the company then expanded to two dozen exchanges last year and said in October it would add to that total. It currently participates in exchanges in 34 states and covers 795,000 people
Insurers say they have struggled, in particular, with customers who have signed up for coverage outside regular enrollment windows and then dumped expensive claims on their books, a problem the government has said it would address.
A dozen nonprofit health insurance cooperatives created by the ACA to sell coverage on the exchanges have already folded, and the survivors all lost millions last year.
Other publicly traded insurers like Aetna have said that they have lost money on this business as well. But some companies, like Molina Healthcare, have said they have managed to turn a profit from the exchanges.
Analysts expect other insurers to also trim their exchange participation in 2017, especially if they continue to struggle with high costs.
Source: Fox News
9 Comments
BarryCare was designed to fail, and lead us into the promised land of Universal Health Care. Too bad the land of UHC is a mirage.
obuma care was never an insurance driven plan. it was simply a way to distribute wealth differently. There are probably many more people without good health care now than before obuma care existed. The people that have it are paying too much and the deductibles are huge.
These plans have structures and concepts that are the opposite of true insurance, so obuma takes massive funds from medicare and social security and taxes to fund a broken concept, which will fail about the same time this idiot leaves the WH.
obuma has no game, no successes, no courage, no interest in anything but votes, no balls. He is simply the biggest PC cartoon. A disgusting mole faced attempt at a man.
No wonder everyone is laughing at him!
It was inevitable from the beginning. The unaffordable care act was founded on a lie and passed by corruption .
BIGGEST RIP-OFF OF AMERICANS AND DOCTORS AND INSURANCE COMPANIES. THEY STUCKED IT IN BEHIND AMERICANS BACKS AND THEN SAID THEY COULD KEEP THEIR OWN DOCTORS,ANOTHER LIE. IT SHOULD BE COMPLETELY THROWN OUT. AND THEN WHEN AMERICANS COMPLAINED ABOUT IT, HARRY REID SAID THE AMERICANS WERE LYING. AND THEY WERE NOT LYING, THEY WERE TELLING THE TRUTH. OF COURSE REID’S A LIAR ANYWAY.
As an insurance agent for 20 years, I am now forced out of the individual health insurance market due to the loss of commission. The “affordable” care act did nothing to lower premiums. It only gave free money called subsidies to folks that qualifies to help pay the higher than ever premiums. When insurance companies are not allowed to underwrite an applicant, cannot reward an applicant for being in good health and have to add coverage such as maternity, mental health and pediatric dental and vision to even a young man’s coverage, it is a recipe for rates to skyrocket. Heck, you have folks that need a $180,000 surgery, buy the coverage, have the surgery and then drop the coverage a month or two after the surgery. There’s nothing that the insurance carrier can do about it, besides lose millions of dollars in the process. This is all done by design by the democrats to achieve a single government health care system as is the type in England.
I am disabled and live on social security, my wife is my caregiver and my daughter is disabled. Cannot afford the forced Obama Insurance, I’ll be bankrupt soon.
Because it was created without any medical people involved and sold as a non taxed program and approved by the supreme court after the chief justice said it could pass IF they did not call it a tax! Without politics involved they could have taken Medicare, gotten rid of the fraud and abuses and added a program that could provide the real needy folks all the care they needed AT A FAR LESS COSTLY PLAN!
The way the Affordable Care Act was littlerally pushed through Congress with threats and without giving our representatives proper time to study the bill was unconscionable and a heavy-handed act by this president. There was no time allowed to study it, to develop it alternatives or make suggestions. It was ill-conceived and the Obama Administration was ill-prepared for its implementation, resulting in trillions of dollars of tax payer waste, government payout fraud, and all-out lies by the commander in chief and his cabinet. It’s a disgrace!
Obamacare should be less costly. An above average or lower income household who doesn’t have disabled or elderly people living together are subject to over 300.00 a month insurance payments, and that cost doesn’t help them pay for their own healthcare. Don’t get me started.