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Canary in the Obamacare Coal Mine


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Major Obamacare Insurer Blue Cross Blue Shield Won’t Turn a Profit in 2017

 

Blue Cross Blue Shield insurers operating in the Affordable Care Act individual market will get close to break-even margins in 2017, according to a report from Standard & Poor's Global Market Intelligence.

 

Obamacare's individual market is fragile and needs about five years to stabilize since its inception in 2014, the report says. This means insurers in this market will likely not hit target profitability until 2018.

 

"After starting on the wrong foot in 2014, and deteriorating further in 2015, we are seeing the first signs in 2016 that this market could be manageable for most health insurers," the report said. "But it isn't on stable footing either."Scissors-32x32.png

 

http://freebeacon.com/issues/major-obamacare-insurer-blue-cross-blue-shield-wont-turn-profit-2017/

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Health Insurers in Maryland Request Premium Rate Hikes as High as 150%

 

Health care insurers in Maryland have requested premium rate hikes as high as 150.83 percent for next year, according to the state's insurance administration.
The five insurers in the individual market requested three different rates to the insurance commissioner, which included a minimum rate increase, a maximum rate increase, and an average rate increase.
The insurers serving the individual market in Maryland include CareFirst BlueChoice, Inc., CareFirst of Maryland, Inc., Cigna Health and Life Insurance Co., Evergreen Health, Inc., and Kaiser Foundation Health Plan of the Mid-Atlantic States.:snip:

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Aetna exiting all ACA insurance marketplaces in 2018

Amy Goldstein

May 10 2017

 

Aetna will complete its withdrawal from Affordable Care Act insurance exchanges for 2018, announcing on Wednesday that lingering financial losses and uncertainty about the marketplaces’ future was prompting it to exit two final states.

According to an Aetna spokesman, the insurer will not sell individual health plans next year in Delaware or Nebraska. Its announcement came a week after the company said it would stop offering ACA health plans in Virginia in 2018 and a month after it said it would leave Iowa.

The cascade of state-by-state decisions represents a stark turnabout for the nation’s third-largest insurer, which initially entered 15 states’ marketplaces but last summer decided to slash its 2017 participation to just four. That retreat was the largest by any health insurer from the health-care law’s marketplaces, which started in 2014 to provide coverage for people who cannot get affordable health benefits through their employers.

 

(Snip)

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Dispelling the myths: The real facts about the AHCA

BY REP DENNIS ROSS (R-FLA.), OPINION CONTRIBUTOR 

:snip:

    •    It was sold to the American people based on broken promises.
    •    People did not get to keep their doctors if they liked them.
    •    4.7 million Americans have been kicked off their healthcare plans.
    •    Nearly 20 million Americans remain uninsured today.
    •    It increased taxes on Americans by $1 trillion.
    •    Deductibles will average more than $6,000 this year, and premiums have risen by 25 percent.
    •    More than one-third of all U.S. counties have only one insurance provider.
    •    In Florida, premiums are expected to increase by 19 percent this year.
    •    49 out of 67 Florida counties are estimated to have only one insurance provider this year.
    •    300,000 Floridians had their plans cancelled under ObamaCare.
    •    The Congressional Budget Office incorrectly estimated 22 million people would flock to ObamaCare.
    •    Insurance providers are fleeing the exchange left and right, with Aetna announcing it will completely leave the exchange by 2018.
    •    Leading Democrats, like former President Bill Clinton and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (N.Y.), have admitted ObamaCare was a mistake and has left Americans with less coverage. 

:snip:

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California’s single-payer plan costs $400 billion — twice the state’s entire budget

The state’s ambitious bid to establish a single-payer health care system has a hefty price tag.

Dylan Scott

May 22 2017

 

California is undertaking an ambitious bid to establish a single-payer health care system, and now its plan has a price tag: $400 billion a year.

The state legislature has been debating a plan this year to implement a government insurance program to cover all Californians, including those without legal status.

It’s a very generous proposal, as currently conceived. The state would pay for almost all of its residents’ medical expenses — inpatient, outpatient, emergency services, dental, vision, mental health, and nursing home care — under the plan, and Californians would not have any premiums, copays, or deductibles. Those sweeping benefits drive up costs.

 

(Snip)

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The Right Prescription Obamacare Doomed by CBO and HHS Reports-Both suggest that AHCA will reduce premiums compared to ACA.

 In late 2009, while the Obamacare debate raged, a Gallup poll found that the public’s top concern about the bill was its potential cost. Seven years later, long after “reform” became law, Gallup found that Americans still named cost as the most urgent health care problem. Consequently, the combined effect of last week’s reports from the Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) and the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) is lethal to Obamacare. HHS reported that insurance premiums have doubled since 2013 while the CBO found that the American Health Care Act (AHCA) will produce lower premiums “than current law.”
“Current law,” in the vernacular of the CBO, means the “Affordable Care Act.” AHCA is, of course, the GOP “repeal and replace” bill that passed the House in early May and is currently under review by the Senate. The CBO’s assertion that AHCA would produce lower premiums than would Obamacare precipitated an inevitable propaganda campaign by the “news” media. Countless outlets published preposterous headlines like this one from Yahoo News: “Budget Office: 23 Million People Would Lose Insurance Under New Health Care Law.” The point of such inaccurate reports was to distract the public from findings like the following:
About one-third of the population resides in states that would [under AHCA] make moderate changes to market regulations. In those states, CBO and JCT expect that, overall, average premiums in the non-group market would be roughly 20 percent lower in 2026 than under current law.:snip:

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Obamacare Insurer Participation Declines 24 Percent in 2017

In 2016, 287 insurers participated on exchanges compared to 218 insurers participating now

Ali Meyer
June 4, 2017

 

The number of health insurers participating in the Affordable Care Act exchanges has declined by 24 percent from 2016 to 2017, according to data from the Kaiser Family Foundation.

In 2016, there were 287 insurers who offered insurance on the Obamacare exchanges and in 2017 that number dropped to 218. There were 34 states that saw the number of insurers decline, 15 states have the same amount of insurers from 2016 to 2017 and only one state added an insurer in 2017.

Five states, Alabama, Alaska, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Wyoming, have only one insurer operating on the exchanges, leaving consumers with little choice.

In one-third of counties in the United States, about one in five enrollees, or 21 percent, have access to only one insurer operating on the exchanges. This is a significant increase from the 2 percent of enrollees in 7 percent of counties that had access to only one insurer last year.

"In 2017, insurance company losses led to a number of high profile exits from the market," the study explains. "In 2017, 58% of enrollees (living in about 30% of counties) had a choice of three or more insurers, compared to 85% of enrollees (living in about 63% of counties) in 2016."

 

 

(Snip)

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Draggingtree

Healthcare: "Insurance" Now Just Means Redistribution

12 HOURS AGO Gary Galles

Americans have been fighting over health insurance reform for ages. For example, 25 years ago, in 1992, over 200 congressional health care bills were introduced.

Unfortunately, while the rhetoric has focused on insurance, such as how many would supposedly gain or lose insurance if some change was implemented, that has not been the real issue. Income redistribution has. As Henry Aaron estimated that year, implementing a comprehensive national health insurance system would redistribute more income than any single national policy then in existence.

What Is Insurance? 

How do we know insurance is not the real issue? Because claimed “reforms” violate so many principles of insurance.

Insurance is about reducing risk in the face of uncertain events. But insuring things that would happen for certain, say annual checkups, offers no risk reduction — it offers no benefits to weigh against the added costs of insurance administration that must be borne — yet such coverage is frequently mandated. :snip: https://mises.org/blog/healthcare-insurance-now-just-means-redistribution 

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Anthem CEO on Ohio exit: ‘those markets are not sustainable’

John Sexton

June 16, 2017

 

Anthem CEO Joseph Swedish announced earlier this month that his company would be pulling out of the Obamacare exchange in Ohio. Yesterday Swedish appeared on CNBC and defended that decision saying some Obamacare markets are not sustainable:

 

(Snip_)

 

 

 

(Snip)

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Draggingtree

Did Obamacare Really Save Lives?

10 HOURS AGO Robert P. Murphy

One of the popular objections to the GOP proposals to reform health insurance markets is that the Affordable Care Act (aka “ObamaCare”) saved thousands of lives per year, and hence that tinkering with ObamaCare will literally kill lots of people. For example, Hillary Clinton tweeted out:

Now to be sure, even if the claim were true, it still wouldn’t follow that coercive redistribution of wealth was morally justified. However, as happens so often in political controversies, libertarians don’t have to choose between property rights and tolerating widespread suffering. Believe it or not, the data suggest that if anything, ObamaCare actually caused more Americans to die.

None of what I write in this piece should be construed as an endorsement of the GOP bills. But the claim that they would “kill lots of people” is not valid.

:snip: 

Conclusion

Although I personally do not yet have a theory on the specific mechanism that may be responsible, I amconfident in saying that the actual data do not support the breathless claims that rolling back ObamaCare will literally kill many thousands of Americans. Fans of the Austrian school should not be shocked, though, to discover that having the federal government get more heavily involved in the health sector has apparently made things worse :snip: https://mises.org/blog/did-obamacare-really-save-lives

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Draggingtree

ObamaCare Moment of Truth

GOP moderates get all they want and they still won’t commit to yes.

By 

The Editorial Board

July 13, 2017 7:26 p.m. ET

419 COMMENTS

Republican leaders unveiled a revised health-care bill on Thursday, setting up a Senate watershed next week. Few votes will reveal more about the principles and character of this Congress.

Months of stations-of-the-cross negotiations between conservative and GOP moderates have pulled the bill towards the political center, and for the most part the new version continues the journey. This leftward shift is Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s bid to meet the demands of still-recalcitrant Republican moderates. The bill remains a net improvement over the Obama Care status quo, but the question now is whether they’ll take yes for an answer.

In the new bill, the GOP’s economic growth wing made a major and bitter concession by retaining the 3.8-percentage-point surcharge on investment income. This political capitulation doesn’t even phase out the tax. Repealing this millstone on investment and rising wages has allegedly been a Republican goal for years, and the Senate voted to do so as recently as 2015. Markets have also been expecting relief, meaning the retreat will undercut an economy that can’t afford many political shocks. :snip: https://t.co/phVKllcr13

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Northwell Health Drops Out of Obamacare Exchanges Due to Bankrupting Costs

Company owed $112 million in risk-adjustment payments last year, owes $100 million next year

Ali Meyer
August 25, 2017

 

Northwell Health, a health insurer in New York, has announced it is dropping out of the Obamacare exchanges due to bankrupting costs, the New York Post reported.

The health insurer said it is exiting the exchanges due to Obamacare's risk-adjustment payments and Congress, which hasn't been able to fix it.

The company owed $112 million for a risk-insurance pool last year, which was designed to help insurers with costlier and sicker enrollees. The company would owe $100 million on these types of payments next year.

"The high payments were bankrupting CareConnect—formed in 2013—and becoming a financial drain on its parent company, Northwell," the article states. "The payments to the risk-adjustment pool accounted for 44 percent of CareConnect's revenue in 2016."

The CEO said this path was financially unsustainable and the regulations have made the market unstable.

 

 

(Snip)

 

___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

 

Oh If Only Someone Had Warned About This!

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Freedom Caucus chair calls new ObamaCare repeal bill 'promising'

 
Via Billy
House Freedom Caucus Chairman Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) said Friday that a new ObamaCare replacement bill in the Senate is the "most promising" option for repealing the law.
 
Meadows spoke favorably of the bill from Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Bill Cassidy (R-La.), which would replace ObamaCare with block grants to states instead of the law's current spending on subsidies and Medicaid expansion.
 
 
"The most promising thing right now, Joe, is Senator Lindsey Graham and Senator Cassidy working on a block-grant issue," Meadows said on MSNBC's "Morning Joe."
 
 
More @ The Hill
 
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Trump readies executive order that will let consumers cross state lines to buy health insurance

 

Donald Trump is preparing an executive order that would achieve a long standing goal of insurance reform advocates. 
The president's executive order will reportedly allow individuals to join group plans from out of state.  Current law allows companies to sell across state linesn but due to red tape and resistance by state insurance officials, most companies refuse to take advantage of the opportunity. The order would allow consumers to join associations and group health plans located in other states.
ABC News:
Current law allows companies to sell health insurance across state lines, but so far few have offered out-of-state policies. To date, although all states have the authority to do so, only six have enacted across state lines legislation.:snip:

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October 18, 2017

Trump Signals He Won't Support Obamacare Insurance Company Subsidies Deal

—Ace

Meanwhile, most of the GOPe Senators the #SmartSet #NeverTrumpers #SalonHot25 are so enamored with are totally on board with the Alexander/Murray "deal."

Lindsey Graham being a notable and surprising exception -- he says he wants to repeal Obamacare, not prop it up.

I thought I saw FoxNews report Trump signaled that he wanted more reforms, but I don't see this in this article, and i can't swear to my recollection's accuracy. Especially after having my mind blown by that Hillary Clinton reality disjunction.     :snip:     http://ace.mu.nu/archives/372073.php

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October 21, 2017

Obamacare hits an iceberg called 'the rule of law'

By Silvio Canto, Jr.

The latest nonsense from the left is that President Trump forced the collapse of Obamacare. In fact, the iceberg hit this ship called the Affordable Health Care Act years ago, as Avik Roy reminded us:

[T]he reason ObamaCare weighed in at 2,000 pages is because the law passed by Democrats detailed, in highly specific language, how Washington would run the health care system from here on out.

While the HHS Secretary – in those days, Kathleen Sebelius – would have the authority to determine exactly how to implement Obamacare's rules, the Obama administration was (in theory) bound by the statutory law passed by Congress.

Now, in reality, the Obama administration was highly selective in enforcing the ACA as written. 

Here are just some examples of ways in which Obama simply ignored the ACA and decided to do what he thought was best, regardless of the law:  :snip: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2017/10/obamacare_hits_an_iceberg_called_the_rule_of_law.html

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Republican lawmakers take Trump's Obamacare repeal snub in stride

Robert King

Jan 31, 2018

Several Republicans weren’t too concerned that President Trump did not say during the State of the Union that he wanted to get rid of the rest of Obamacare.

Trump touted the repeal of the health law’s individual mandate in tax reform during his first State of the Union Tuesday. Some Republicans weren’t surprised that Trump did not make a renewed push to get rid of the rest of Obamacare after Congress failed to do so last year.

 

“Obviously when you’ve had two failures you don't want to necessarily go and use that on the State of the Union, but there is real work going on behind the scenes on healthcare,” said Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., leader of the conservative House Freedom Caucus.

Meadows did not detail the behind-the-scenes work. However, the Trump administration is making administrative moves to broaden access to cheaper plans that offer skimpy coverage.

 

(Snip)

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One state pursues 'end of ObamaCare,' setting stage for new fight

 

Idaho has become ground zero in a new ObamaCare fight, with officials pursuing major changes that could serve as a national model for other states looking to expand insurance options in defiance of the law – even as Democrats warn of higher costs for vulnerable customers.
As soon as April, Blue Cross of Idaho is planning to make new options available.
That’s after Gov. Butch Otter and Lt. Gov. Brad Little co-signed an executive order asking the Department of Insurance to seek creative ways to make health coverage more affordable. The move opened the door for plans that don’t adhere to ObamaCare coverage requirements – though with the Trump administration testing similar ideas, the state may be unlikely to face much resistance from the White House.:snip:

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Draggingtree

The New Challenge to Obamacare

Is this a chance for the Supreme Court to correct its constitutional mistake?

Randy Barnett / |March 7, 2018 9:44 am

Readers may be familiar with a new constitutional challenge by 20 state attorneys general to the Affordable Care Act, which Ilya blogged about here. Their argument, in a nutshell, is that with the amount of the penalty for failing to have health insurance now set to zero, the individual insurance "requirement"--AKA the "individual mandate"--can no longer be justified as a tax. This is so because one of the essential characteristics of a tax is that it raises at least some revenue for the government. For this reason, the "saving construction" employed by Chief Justice Roberts no longer applies, as it is no longer even a "reasonably possible" reading of the insurance requirement, which now raises no revenue.

 On this claim, the AG's are on very strong ground. To the extent they are correct, the NFIB v. Sebelius was a bigger victory than we realized when it was decided, as it left the insurance mandate susceptible to being killed off in this way via reconciliation.   :snip: 

 Because this constitutional claim makes sense, the attention will turn to the issue of standing and, perhaps, mainly to severability. If the insurance requirement is invalidated, does that bring down the rest of the Affordable Care Act?:     :snip:  http://reason.com/volokh/2018/03/07/the-new-challenge-to-obamacare

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Draggingtree

March 8, 2018

Obamacare's latest 21,904 dead bodies

By Monica Showalter

Remember how President Obama, back when he was selling Obamacare to the public, oleaginously assured that his plan would expand health care access to the millions?  And how he pooh-poohed the Republican claim that such socialized medicine would result in long waiting lines, same as those seen in every other socialized-medicine country?

Turns out the waiting lists are there, and it's the sickest people – those who require home care or institutionalization – who are waiting longest.  In fact, according to a new report from the Foundation for Government Accountability, at least 21,904 have died, waiting in line, victims of Obama's Medicaid expansion, which prioritized quantities of people on the rolls over a neediest-first policy.  According to Pajamas Media's Tyler O'Neil:   :snip:       https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/03/obamacares_latest_21904_dead_bodies.html

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Draggingtree

Obamacare: Decreasing the Surplus Population

Posted on March 16, 2018 by The Political Hat

     Remember how Obamacare (i.e. the misnamed “Affordable Care Act”) was supposed to make sure that those who needed medical attention would be able to get it? Turns out that it did the opposite and helped make the situation worse.

“Medicaid expansion under Obamacare has contributed to bloated enrollment waiting lists for disabled individuals, according to a new report. Many of those on the lists die waiting as funding goes toward coverage for thousands of able-bodied — and sometimes fraudulent — Medicaid recipients, the Foundation for Government Accountability said.

“The research focused on individuals who receive home and community-based, or HBCS, waivers. These are people with severe intellectual or mental disabilities, brain or spinal cord injuries, and other debilitating conditions.

“States can limit enrollment into the HCBS waiver program, and once the cap is reached, individuals get placed on waiting lists — where they may be waiting for years to receive care for their disabilities without being institutionalized.       :snip:          http://politicalhat.com/2018/03/16/obamacare-decreasing-the-surplus-population/

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