People joked for a while about how insurers were pulling out of Obamacare markets so fast we might end up with areas in which there were no insurers at all. It’s no joke anymore: with Aetna’s massive withdrawal yesterday from the Affordable Care Act marketplace, Pinal County, Arizona, the third most populated county in that state, currently has no insurers selling policies on the Exchange. The issue isn’t so much whether people will be subject to the individual mandate tax of up to 2.5% of their income when there are no policies available; an administration that has no difficulty calling a utility shutoff notice a hardship that excuses one from the individual mandate (whether or not the utility was actually shut off) should have no difficulty declaring the non-existence of any insurance to be grounds for an exemption. The issue is that Pinal County, although a bit of an outlier for now, is a harbinger for fundamental problems with the ACA now manifesting themselves with greater clarity across the country. When an insurer covering over 7% of those in the Exchanges and previously hoping to expand instead drops out, we better look at what is going on.
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