The Obamacare Collapse
Leave it to Big Government to coerce a market into existence, where individuals are required to buy a product they can’t afford to use, and which producers can’t afford to sell — and then blame the free market for the inevitable collapse. -Stephen Green
[Aug 2016]: Barack Obama’s signature health-care law is struggling for one overriding reason: Selling mispriced insurance is a precarious business model... Total enrollment this year will be barely half the 22 million the Congressional Budget Office projected just three years ago. Premiums, meanwhile, are set to skyrocket, which will further hamper enrollment. -Greg Ip 
[Aug 2016]: The health insurance exchanges that are the beating heart of Obamacare are on the edge of collapse, with premiums rising sharply for ever narrower provider networks, non-profit health co-ops shuttering their doors, and even the biggest insurance companies heading for the exits amid mounting losses. -Phil Kerpen
[May 2016]: Obamacare has caused health insurance premiums to skyrocket. It has caused millions of Americans who liked their health plans to lose their health plans. It has caused doctor and hospital networks to narrow. Now the Wall Street Journal reports that the Obamacare exchanges in Alabama and Alaska will each have one—that's right, one—insurer offering plans. We're moving toward "single insurer" health care.
In short, Obamacare is wrecking the private health insurance market. -Jeffrey H. Anderson
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State officials sounded the alarm Wednesday on Capitol Hill about skyrocketing ObamaCare premiums as insurers across the country propose double-digit rate hikes – renewing pressure on Congress to act...
Oklahoma Insurance Commissioner John Doak told the panel he has been warning about “spiking rates” for too long and those warnings “have been ignored at the federal level.” “Oklahoma is facing the collapse of our individual health insurance market,” Doak said, adding that the state has seen a rise in premiums of 130 percent over the last four years...
Doak said that Oklahomans have seen a “drastic decrease in competition,” leaving them with fewer choices each year—in 2014, Oklahoma could choose plans from five carriers, but in 2017, Oklahomans have only one.
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Health insurer Aetna announced Thursday that it would completely withdraw from the Obamacare exchanges in 2018, after seeing its profits soar from reducing its participation this year. The company said during an earnings call that it was withdrawing from the exchange in Nevada, the last state it had considered staying in...
Aetna has been gradually withdrawing from the Obamacare exchanges. It had decided to pull out of the exchanges in other states because it lost $700 million between 2014 and 2016 and was projected to lose $200 million in 2017...
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A major insurance company has decided to entirely withdraw from all of Obamacare‘s health insurance exchanges in 2018. According to the Washington Examiner, the experience with Obamacare has been a financial disaster for Aetna, one of the nation’s largest insurance companies. The insurance giant sustained almost $700 million in losses between 2014 and 2016, and an estimated $200 million in projected losses for 2017.
Aetna Leaves Obamacare
Aetna/Coventry quits Obamacare in AR, AZ, CT, FL, GA, IL, KS, KY, LA, ME, MI, MO, NC, OH, PA, SC, TN, TX, UT, and WV for 2018. #ItsWorking pic.twitter.com/Nlr5LhRvcG
— Phil Kerpen (@kerpen) June 22, 2017
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Aetna Inc. Chief Executive Officer Mark Bertolini escalated his criticism of the Affordable Care Act, saying Obamacare’s markets are nearing failure as premiums climb and healthier individuals drop out.
“It is in a death spiral,” Bertolini said in a video interview with the Wall Street Journal that aired Wednesday on the newspaper’s website. He predicted that more insurers will drop out of the market for 2018, following Humana Inc.’s decision to quit Obamacare entirely for next year.
"The current Affordable Care Act trajectory is not sustainable."
Now the insurers are beginning to realize that in spite of all the subsidies and mandates working in their favor, and despite all of the cost-cutting they have had to do at the expense of consumers, they just can't make money in this system. -Washington Examiner
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[Oct 2016]: Tennessee is ground zero for ObamaCare’s nationwide implosion. Late last month the state insurance commissioner, Julie Mix McPeak, approved premium increases of up to 62% in a bid to save the exchange set up under the Affordable Care Act. “I would characterize the exchange market in Tennessee as very near collapse,” she said.
All told, more than 60% of our state’s ObamaCare consumers will lose their coverage heading into 2017. When they go in search of a replacement plan, they will confront two unfortunate realities: a dearth of options and skyrocketing costs.
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Minnesota's top health insurance regulator says the state's individual market is in "an emergency situation" amid big rate increases for next year. Department of Commerce Commissioner Mike Rothman said Friday that the five companies offering plans through the state's exchange or directly to consumers were prepared to leave the market for 2017...
Rate increases finalized this week range from a 50 percent average hike for HealthPartners plans to a 67 percent jump on average on UCare. But Rothman called it a temporary fix and called on lawmakers to make reforms before the market collapses.
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Faced with "a deteriorating financial condition," another health insurance carrier is pulling out of New Jersey's health exchange marketplace created under the Affordable Care Act, forcing 35,000 policy holders to find a new plan in 2017, the state's top insurance official announced Monday night.
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The experts projected that 36 percent of exchange market rating regions in the United States in 2017 will have just one health insurance carrier, and 55 percent of regions will have two or fewer carriers. Large health insurers have announced they are exiting the marketplaces because of unsustainable financial losses. “Lower-than-expected enrollment, a high cost population, and troubled risk mitigation programs have led to decreased plan participation for 2017,” said Dan Mendelson, president of Avalere.
Insurance companies such as UnitedHealthcare and Aetna are losing billions trying to sell ObamaCare plans, and the risk is they’ll drop out at the end of 2016. No insurance companies means no ObamaCare.
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Aetna (AET) said Tuesday it is canceling plans to expand into five more states next year and will reassess its involvement in the 15 states where it currently offers coverage on the individual exchanges. Aetna -- which expects to lose $300 million (pre-tax) on its Obamacare business this year -- must conclude its review by the end of September and notify states where it intends to withdraw.
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[July 2016]: Obamacare enrollment declined by 1.6 million customers between the end of open enrollment in January through March, according to new data released by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). CMS’ Obamacare “Snapshot” reveals that enrollment in President Barack Obama’s signature healthcare program dropped to 11.1 million consumers, down from the 12.7 million who signed up prior to the January 31 deadline.
The drop in enrollment represents a nearly 13 percent decline in the number of people paying their premiums and maintaining an active policy as of March 31.
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A major insurer is taking the federal government to court to get nearly $223 million it says is owed to them through Obamacare. Highmark Inc., the fourth-largest Blue Cross and Blue Shield-affiliated organization, filed a lawsuit on Tuesday against the federal government to recoup losses racked up by participating in the healthcare program.
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Another major insurer announced it is considering leaving some of Obamacare’s exchanges after losing money and customers. In financial reports released Monday, Humana said that it is likely to exit some exchanges in 2017 after reporting lower earnings and a drop in enrollment in its individual plans, including some sold under the Affordable Care Act.
In sum, it’s a problem so pressing that even Ezekiel Emanuel, one of the major players behind Obama’s health care reforms, took to the Wall Street Journal this week to declare, “If Mr. Obama doesn’t act soon to control costs, escalating costs may ultimately threaten the sustainability of his coverage expansion.” -Helaine Olen
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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.
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Health insurance companies are amplifying their warnings about the financial sustainability of the ObamaCare marketplaces as they seek approval for premium increases next year. Insurers say they are losing money on their ObamaCare plans at a rapid rate, and some have begun to talk about dropping out of the marketplaces altogether.... And a report from McKinsey & Company found that in the individual market, which includes the ObamaCare marketplaces, insurers lost money in 41 states in 2014, and were only profitable in 9 states.
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UnitedHealth Group Inc. plans to exit a third state Obamacare market as the insurer works to stem losses from its struggling Affordable Care Act business. The insurer won’t sell policies through Michigan’s ACA exchange for next year, according to Andrea Miller, a spokeswoman for the state’s Department of Insurance and Financial Services.
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Startup Oscar Health lost $92.4 million in its New York health insurance business last year, a sign that insurers of all sizes are struggling in the new markets created by President Barack Obama’s health-care overhaul. The loss, on premium revenue of $118.2 million, was disclosed by Oscar in a filing with New York regulators.
A top House Democrat slammed Obamacare’s inability “to work” — but only after he announced his impending retirement from Congress. 12-term Virginia Rep. Jim Moran, an Appropriations Committee member who said this month that he will not seek re-election in 2014, said that not enough young people are signing up for Obamacare coverage to make the law work.
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The nation’s largest health insurer, UnitedHealthcare Group, made made headlines last month with an announcement that the company was considering pulling out of ObamaCare. Now, Cleveland-based health insurer HealthSpan is actually doing what UnitedHealthcare threatened, disbanding its network of physicians and announcing that it will no longer participate in the individual markets under ObamaCare.
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The CEO of UnitedHealthCare on Tuesday said he regretted the decision to enter the ObamaCare marketplace last year, which the company says has resulted in millions of dollars in losses. “It was for us a bad decision,” UnitedHealth CEO Stephen Hemsley said at an investor’s meeting in New York, according to Bloomberg Business.
UnitedHealth, the country’s largest insurer, announced last month that it would no longer advertise its ObamaCare plans over the next year and may pull out completely in 2016 — a move that sent shockwaves across the healthcare sector.
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UnitedHealth Group, the country’s largest health insurer, announced on Thursday that it was expecting to lose $600 million on Obamacare policies in 2016 from the health insurance exchange websites, and may terminate its Obamacare business by 2017. This was a sudden turnabout for the company. It was just a month ago that the company had said in an earnings call that they expected to expand their Obamacare coverage in 2017.
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Federal officials have a secret list of 11 Obamacare health insurance co-ops they fear are on the verge of failure, but they refuse to disclose them to the public or to Congress, a Daily Caller News Foundation investigation has learned. Just in the last three weeks, five of the original 24 Obamacare co-ops announced plans to close, bringing the total of failures to nine barely two years after their launch with $2 billion in start-up capital from the taxpayers under the Affordable Care Act.
Obamacare: The Collapse of Cover Oregon
This is pretty close to what the Obama administration dreams of: Insurance plans looking to woo millions of new customers—and slashing their rates in the process.
Somebody better call “Pajama Boy,” because the first demographic snapshot of ObamaCare signups looks like a mess. The shorthand: President Obama’s signature entitlement program needs 40 percent of its enrollees to be paying customers in the prime 18-34 age range. Otherwise, the risk pool will be too shallow and insurers will have to jack up rates even more on everyone else in order to stay solvent. The first numbers show only 25 percent of enrollees are in the most desirable demographic.
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ObamaCare exchanges have just met a target of 2.8 million young-adult enrollees. The bad news: That target was for last year. By now, there were supposed to have been roughly 5 million paying customers between the ages of 18 and 34. Lagging young-adult enrollment is among the reasons why so many big insurers on the exchanges are seeking premium hikes of 20% or more for 2016. Among the 11.7 million people who selected 2015 exchange plans, 1.5 million never paid or quickly canceled their coverage, the Department of Health and Human Services reported Tuesday.
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Taxpayers and a federal grant of $179 million helped to get Connect for Health Colorado off the ground but, “the exchange is ultimately supposed to be self-sustaining, funded through the sale of insurance plans.” Unfortunately for the state’s exchange, “enrollment numbers have not met expectations laid out in the financial modeling created before the exchange became operational.” Connect for Health Colorado currently charges a fees on almost all health insurance plans sold in Colorado, whether they are on the exchange or not.
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The nation's third-largest health insurer had 720,000 people sign up for exchange coverage as of May 20, a spokesman confirmed to IBD. At the end of June, it had fewer than 600,000 paying customers. Aetna expects that to fall to "just over 500,000" by the end of the year.
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A survey by McKinsey determined that 27 percent of new enrollees were previously uninsured, though ensuring those without coverage was the main purpose of creating the law. Of those 27 percent of previously uninsured enrollees, about 13 percent have paid their premiums, according to McKinsey.
Aetna announced in early August that it would not expand into additional Obamacare markets and that it might consider leaving existing markets. It's just the latest example of the failures of this massive healthcare law... UnitedHealth Group announced in April it would leave most Obamacare exchanges, after expecting to lose $650 million from the exchanges this year. -Ashe Schow
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The Cover Oregon health insurance exchange is one of the worst in the country at attracting younger enrollees, according to a new federal report. Only 18 percent of those who've enrolled through the Oregon exchange fall between the ages of 18-34, a healthier age bracket considered crucial to keeping future premiums down.
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The Obama administration announced new Obamacare numbers showing that they’ll need to sign up a whopping 1.8 million people in March to meet even their pared-down goals. The Obama administration has already given up meeting its original 7 million-strong enrollment goal, but the new numbers suggest it may not reach its lowered 6 million enrollment target either. The pace of enrollment fell far in February, with 942,833 people selecting plans, down from 1,146,071 sign-ups in January.
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According to the report, released by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, 24 percent of the nearly 2.2 million people who enrolled in the marketplaces through the end of December are between the ages of 18 and 34. One-third are 55 to 64 years old. The figures mean that the proportion of young adults is lagging behind what both government and outside health-policy analysts have said will be required for the exchanges to remain stable.
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Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber, a Democrat, walked out of an interview at the urging of a staff member, when asked about the state’s poor health online exchange that has even underperformed the federal Healthcare.gov exchange... KATU News reports that not a single person has enrolled in the state exchange online since it began in October 2012.
UnitedHealth Group in a surprising announcement, said this morning it has revised its profit expectations for the rest of the year due to what it called a “deterioration” of its individual commercial insurance offerings on government-run exchanges under the Affordable Care Act and offered no commitment it would stay in the business beyond next year. -John Hayward
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The embattled director of Oregon’s Obamacare exchange has officially resigned after a month of medical leave from overseeing the state’s flailing marketplace. Rocky King has been on medical leave since Dec. 2, announcing his decision just before a board meeting evaluating his performance at Cover Oregon.
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"If it's so much more expensive than what we anticipated and if the coverage is not as good as what we had, you've got a complete meltdown at that time," Manchin told CNN's "State of the Union" program. "It falls of its own weight, if basically the cost becomes more than we can absorb, absolutely."
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Merrill Matthews, a resident scholar at the Institute for Policy Innovation, predicted a “death spiral” in which the rates rise over the next several years, leading healthy people to drop their coverage while “very sick” people “stay in until the very last drop,” forcing rates up even more. “The death spiral is well known in health insurance,” he said.
Obamacare Post Failure Analysis
Obamacare failed because it flunked Economics 101 and Human Nature 101. It straitjacketed insurers into providing overly expensive, soup-to-nuts policies. -Chicago Tribune Editorial Board
Obamacare is falling apart limb by limb, and there is really no keeping it together. It could well become President Obama's Iraq: A costly and conceited intervention that destroyed an imperfect but functioning system just because it didn't fit his utopian designs. -Shikha Dalmia
The government-run exchanges are flailing. And the vaunted nonprofit Obamacare co-ops that were supposed to dramatically lower costs have bombed despite billions in taxpayer subsidies. I believe this insurance market meltdown -- which many of us predicted from the get-go -- is not by accident, but by design. Or as Oklahoma Insurance Commissioner John D. Doak put it: "This system has been doomed from the beginning." -Michelle Malkin