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.As we've said before, if Blue Cross/Blue Shield gets the willies, then the whole playhouse comes crashing down. UHC is a big player, but its primary business is group health insurance plans for businesses. Still, this isn't helpful if you're an ObamaCare acolyte.
“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.
You can see the issue in the lead -- ObamaCare isn't really a marketplace. People can enter and leave a marketplace voluntarily. While UHC did enter voluntarily, the potential customers it was assuming it would get aren't there voluntarily -- they are there under penalty of law. And in many cases, they are not good risks; you're going to lose money if you are insuring people who are actually going to file claims. The idea behind ObamaCare was that young people would subsidize the older ones. That's not really happening, certainly not at the scale necessary to make the scheme work.
Just a hunch -- 2016 is going to be a hell of a ride.
3 comments:
Maybe they should have been calling it Ukase-Care all along.
I would have to guess that the company heard some negative feedback from their actuaries about the practicality of taking part, which would suggest the question of what prompted them to join the market in the first place. One wonders what pressure might have been applied to get them to do so. What a shame we don't have people with printing presses and websites whose job it is to find out the truth about such matters.
Racist.
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