Sunday, November 22, 2015

#Obamacare is crumbling before our eyes



"We cannot sustain these losses," Hemsley said. "We can't really subsidize a marketplace that doesn't appear at the moment to be sustaining itself." He added that he saw "no data pointing to improvement" in the exchange market.

UnitedHealth is a big company that can survive this kind of setback, but not every year. And there are other insurers who could not take it even once. Twelve of Obamacare's 23 exchange co-ops have recently folded. Other insurers have abandoned state marketplaces. The consequences of an insurer exodus, however large it ends up being, will be an unpleasant increase in premiums in 2017. That will come on top of the dramatic 2016 rate hikes that were announced in many states this summer.

The root causes of this debacle are deeply troubling — a system so badly conceived and constructed that a company with a proven track record in making money on health insurance loses nearly half a billion dollars.