Aetna, one of the nation’s largest health insurers, announced Monday it is pulling out of all but four state exchanges in 2017. It is currently offering exchange plans in 15 states.
Aetna is only the latest insurer to reduce its marketplace presence, citing losses. The news also comes amid reports of double-digit premium hikes next year, another sign of financial trouble for insurers. Most of the nonprofit co-op plans created under the health care law have also shuttered.
“Following a thorough business review and in light of a second-quarter pretax loss of $200 million and total pretax losses of more than $430 million since January 2014 in our individual products, we have decided to reduce our individual public exchange presence in 2017, which will limit our financial exposure moving forward,” said Aetna chairman and CEO Mark Bertolini in a statement.
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Blue Shield of California is shutting down for the four days after Labor Day to reduce its payroll-related liabilities, citing losses in California’s Covered California Obamacare exchange and other commercial and individual lines of business.
The move will affect most of its 6,000 employees in California, except about 1,000 who work for Care1st, which it acquired last fall for $1.2 billion, and some staffers in customer service and related areas who will remain on the job. The exact number of workers involved hasn’t yet been tabulated, according to the San Francisco-based insurer.
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After the Affordable Care Act took effect in 2010, it created a review mechanism intended to prevent exorbitant increases in health insurance rates by shaming companies that sought them.
But this summer, insurers are turning that process on its head, using it to highlight the reasons they are losing money under the health care law and their case for raising premiums in 2017.
That has ignited an election-year fight between insurers and consumers, who are complaining bitterly about the double-digit increases being sought across the country.
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A new report in Health Affairs has found that the smoking penalties imposed by the Obamacare health plans have not succeeded in getting smokers to quit. Even worse, the penalties have deterred some smokers from obtaining health insurance in the first place.
The health insurance plans offered on the exchanges established by the Affordable Care Act (ACA) cover smoking cessation treatment with no cost sharing. As a further “nudge” to quit smoking, the insurance plans charge tobacco users up to 50 percent more in premiums than non-users. For purposes of the surcharge, a Department of Health and Human Services regulation defines tobacco use as self-reported consumption of “any tobacco product, including cigarettes, cigars, chewing tobacco, snuff, and pipe tobacco, four or more times a week within the past 6 months.”
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Most health policy experts knew, and many warned, that the Affordable Care Act would lead to massive consolidation in the health care industry, including hospitals, physicians’ practices, and especially health insurers. Now the Justice Department is pushing back by opposing the mergers of four large health insurers—Aetna with Humana and Anthem with Cigna—as they try to survive the Obamacare wasteland.
The Obama administration defended its opposition by claiming the mergers would reduce competition.Attorney General Loretta Lynch explained, “If allowed to proceed, these mergers would fundamentally reshape the health insurance industry.” That’s rich, since nothing has reshaped the health insurance industry more than Obamacare—and by design.
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Washington experts have been frequently wrong about the Affordable Care Act.
They projected far more enrollees in ACA exchanges than materialized. They also projected that the individual insurance market would stabilize in 2016 with robust competition. Instead, the country is grappling with enormous premium hikes and fewer choices.
A new government report reveals perhaps the largest mistake yet: Medicaid enrollees who gained coverage through the ACA cost almost 50 percent more, on average, than the government projected just one year ago.
ACA supporters often point to Medicaid expansion as the law’s greatest success since it reduced the overall uninsurance rate. We now know that result comes with a gigantic price tag.
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A government report finds that the cost of expanding Medicaid to millions more low-income people is increasing faster than expected, raising questions about a vital part of President Barack Obama’s health care law.
The law provided for the federal government to pay the entire cost of the Medicaid expansion from 2014 through the end of this year.
Obama has proposed an extra incentive for states that have not yet expanded Medicaid: three years of full federal financing no matter when they start. But the new cost estimates could complicate things.
In a recent report to Congress, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said the cost of expansion was $6,366 per person for 2015, about 49 percent higher than previously estimated.
Hillary Clinton admits she’s running to extend the Obama legacy, and so far she’s had a free ride in defending it. She hasn’t even had to explain the increasingly obvious failures of ObamaCare to deliver the affordable insurance that Democrats promised.
The Affordable Care Act is now rolling into its fourth year, and even liberals are starting to concede that the insurance exchanges are in distress and Congress may have to reopen the law. Premiums are high and soaring; insurers have booked multimillion-dollar losses and are terminating plans; and the customer pool is smaller, older and less healthy than the official projections.
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The Affordable Care Act has overwhelmed large swaths of the economy, and the Administration is poised to upend yet another, by overriding Congress’ directives on how Medicare pays for the medicines that physicians prescribe under that program. Patients, healthcare providers and drug manufacturers all stand to suffer from the Administration’s disregard of a statutory mandate that controls over $20 billion in payments a year.
In the Medicare statute, Congress laid out a formula for Part-B drugs (those you get at a doctor’s office): Providers receive 106% of the average sales price—that is, the going rate plus a little to cover overhead costs. Enter the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI), a bureaucracy within a bureaucracy, created to test “innovative payment and service delivery models.” CMMI recently proposed to “test” an approach to paying for Medicare Part-B drugs that will change reimbursements for three-quarters of the country.
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“Irony is wasted on the stupid.” This quote, attributed to Oscar Wilde, seems fitting in light of the Obama administration’s new campaign to block two blockbuster mergers between the health insurers Aetna and Humana and Anthem and Cigna. (It is also fighting hospital consolidation in many states.) The administration is rightly worried that this will lead to higher health care costs through reduced competition, yet it ignores the fact that its signature law, the Affordable Care Act, was specifically designed to foment such consolidation.
The central planners behind the Affordable Care Act – also known as Obamacare – were convinced that consolidation in health care would lead to decreased health care spending by eliminating duplication, standardizing treatment protocols and incentivizing better utilization. As three of Obamacare’s primary authors wrote in The Annals of Internal Medicine in 2010, the law was designed to “unleash forces that favor integration across the continuum of care.” No part of health care was supposed to be spared – doctors, hospitals, insurers, pharmaceutical companies and others were given regulatory and financial incentives to merge.
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