The next president may be f*cked

The next president could be dealing with an ObamaCare insurer meltdown in his or her very first month.
The fourth ObamaCare signup period begins about one week before Election Day, and it will end about one week before inauguration on Jan. 20. After mounting complaints from big insurers about losing money this year, the results could serve as a kind of judgment day for ObamaCare, experts say...
Some, like UnitedHealth Group, say they’ve seen enough and are already vowing to leave the exchanges.
Levitt and other experts warn that if the numbers don’t improve this year, more insurers could bolt. That would deal a major blow to marketplace competition while also driving up rates and keeping even more people out of the exchanges...
In the last month, two major insurers — Aetna and Anthem — both reversed course on their plans to expand in the marketplace. Now, all five of the nation’s largest insurers say they are losing money on the exchanges.

Opinion of Obamacare hasn't changed

More Americans disapprove of Obamacare than approve. In a poll conducted in July by the Kaiser Family Foundation, which supports the goals of Obamacare, 46 percent of respondents disapproved of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), while only 40 percent approved. When the first poll was conducted in April 2010, with Obamacare fresh off the press, 46 percent of the public favored it, while 40 percent opposed. In July 2010 half of respondents voiced support for the law. In the mind of the American public, that was Obamacare’s high-water mark. It has been downhill since then.

Anohter insurer sues the Feds

The state’s largest insurer of individual health plans is suing the federal government for over $20 million in owed payments...
Despite a successful first year in which it posted a net income of $7.3 million, the Maine co-op showed a net loss of $74 million last year. Now the organization, which writes insurance plans for over 75,000 Mainers and once was held up as one of the few co-op success stories, is joining other insurers in suing the federal government for nonpayment of money that was designed to cover big losses in the marketplace...
But as insurers accumulated losses, the federal government slowed risk corridor payments to a trickle. That’s because Congress restricted the amount of money the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services can pay insurers like MCHO when it passed a spending bill in 2014.
That year, insurers claimed nearly $2.9 billion through the risk corridor program. The feds paid just over $360 million, less than 13 percent of the claims.
Now, all but seven of the 23 co-ops have shuttered. The others like MCHO, as well as big commercial insurers, are suing the feds for the risk corridor money. A class action suit has been filed in the federal appeals court.

In a New York minute

In a statement on Friday announcing 2017 premiums, NY's Department of Financial Services (DFS) said after weighing insurer requests, the state settled on an average hike of 16.6 percent for individual exchange users in the state, while small group users will see a lower average increase of over 8 percent...
Earlier this year, Blue Cross Blue Shield released a study showing Obamacare user costs were 22 percent higher than people with employer-sponsored health plans, while UnitedHealth plans to exit most exchanges by next year.
The new premium hikes ranged from as little as 8 percent for Aetna Life individual users, to a whopping 80 percent increase for the unlucky policyholders of Crystal Run Health Insurance Company, an insurer that covers parts of the Hudson Valley and Catskills.

One guess as to why

At Forbes, Bruce Japsen writes that insurers think providers are funding nonprofits to pay Obamacare premiums for high-cost Medicaid patients, thus sticking insurers with a lot of big bills for a lot of very sick patients.
Why would they do this, you may be asking yourself? Because Medicaid reimbursements are extremely low.

Death Spiral

ObamaCare policies have proved so unattractive that even customers eligible for subsidies are turning away unless they also happen to be seriously or chronically ill. That’s because deductibles and copays keep going up with each successive renewal period. For a family of four on a bronze plan, the deductible is now above $11,000. This is the equivalent, in the case of routine illness or injury, of not being insured at all....
In a lawsuit, UnitedHealth Group, the country’s biggest health insurer, charges that American Renal Associates, one of the biggest providers of kidney treatment, supplied charitable “donations” to pay for ObamaCare policies (average annual premium $4,800) so patients could patronize American Renal’s dialysis treatment (average annual cost $100,000).
What’s more, United claims many of these patients, for which American Renal billed $4,000 per session, were eligible for Medicare or Medicaid, which pays less than $300 per session.

Get ready

In an effort to prevent more insurers from abandoning the Obamacare exchange in Tennessee, the state's insurance regulator is allowing health insurers refile 2017 rate requests by Aug. 12 after Cigna and Humana said their previously requested premium hikes were too low.
Cigna and Humana filed to increase last year's premiums an average of 23 and 29 percent, respectively, on June 10. But in the interim, both insurance companies have told state regulators that the requests would not cover the expected claims, said Kevin Walters, spokesman for the Tennessee Department of Commerce and Insurance.
If granted, the higher requests would mean bigger jumps in monthly premiums for many people.

Who will be left?

Aetna (AET) said Tuesday it is canceling plans to expand into five more states next year and will reassess its involvement in the 15 states where it currently offers coverage on the individual exchanges. Aetna -- which expects to lose $300 million (pre-tax) on its Obamacare business this year -- must conclude its review by the end of September and notify states where it intends to withdraw. ...
UnitedHealthcare (UNH), the nation's largest insurer, is exiting most Obamacare exchanges in 2017. Humana announced last month that it was pulling out of nearly 1,200 counties in eight states next year. Afterward, it will only be selling insurance on the exchanges in 156 counties in 11 states. Others, including several Blue Cross Blue Shield companies, are also scaling back.
And more than half of the co-op insurers, created and funded by the health reform law, have failed. This means consumers in a growing number of areas have only one or two insurers to pick from.

The Bottom Line

According to the IRS, in tax year 2014 — the most recent year available — some 7.9 million taxpayers opted to pay the penalty. But the total collected, $1.6 billion, came out to only about $210 per taxpayer. By contrast, 12.4 million taxpayers who did not have insurance got at least one of more than a dozen exemptions. That is roughly 20.5 million people who are not on insurance rolls, which health policy experts said has helped fuel rapidly rising insurance premiums.
Experts said they do not believe those numbers have changed substantially since tax year 2014.

Can we have single payer now?