United Healthcare Announces Possible Obamacare Exit

Posted by Tina

The nations largest health care insurer announced this morning it may have to leave the Obamacare exchange program after 2016 and it will cut back it’s advertising for 2017. The problem is that more sick people are signing up for coverage than young healthy people, resulting in unsustainable losses:

In recent weeks, growth expectations for individual exchange participation have tempered industrywide, cooperatives have failed, and market data has signaled higher risks and more difficulties while our own claims experience has deteriorated, so we are taking this proactive step,” said Stephen J. Hemsley, chief executive officer of UnitedHealthGroup. “We continue to be pleased with the growth and overall performance of our Company outside of the individual exchange products and look forward to strong, positive and broad based earnings growth across our enterprise in 2016.”

If this health insurer opts out of Obamacare the rest will follow and Obamacare will collapse. If this insurer opts out the rest will have to absorb many of the sick patients that lose their insurance when United opts out.

This is the what happens when politics, agenda, and lust for power come before the concerns for best interests of ALL of the people. This is what happens when legislation is written and sold to the people based on emotion rather than reason and common sense.

Philip Klein at the Washington Examiner:

Insurers have had trouble signing up young and healthy individuals on the Obamacare exchanges, which is necessary to offset the costs of covering older and sicker enrollees. This has forced insurers to hike premiums, raise deductibles, and slash the number of doctors and hospitals offered on its plans. Meanwhile, the Obama administration has cut its enrollment expectations for 2016 to about half of what they were when the the legislation became law.

In a conference call with investors, Hemsley offered a sober assessment of the exchanges’ future viability. He said that claims data have been getting worse as time has gone on, and there’s no evidence pointing toward improvement.

Asked about whether the company could sustain losses past 2016, he was blunt: “No. We cannot sustain these losses. We can’t really subsidize a marketplace that doesn’t appear at the moment to be sustaining itself.”

The year 2017 is significant for insurers, because that’s the year when several programs designed to mitigate risk for insurers through federal backstops go away. The hope was that those programs would act as training wheels for Obamacare in its first few years of implementation, but after that, the insurers were supposed to be able to thrive on their own. UnitedHealth’s statement suggests otherwise.

Did you catch that? A recipe for failure was cooked in. Universal health care was the goal all along.

This poisonous meal can end next November but it won’t if we elect another socialist.