Obamacare...The Good..Bad and the Ugly

[mr40]

Cigna news is the latest iceberg hit by Obamacare

Obamacare's defenders must feel like the band that played as the Titanic sank into the icy waves of the North Atlantic. Because if Obamacare wasn't a sinking ship already, it certainly is now.

One of the nation's largest health insurers, Cigna Corp., announced Thursday, "it would not expand its individual Obamacare plans into more states next year," according to Reuters. The Cigna announcement marks the latest blow the already-cracked windshield that is Obamacare.

When the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) was crafted in 2009/2010, the nation's largest health insurers, pharmaceutical companies, and health providers were allowed to collude with the White House and Congressional Democrats.

President Obama said that the resulting legislation "...would end the worst practices of insurance companies… No longer would they be able to arbitrarily and massively raise premiums like Anthem Blue Cross recently tried to do in California — up to 39 percent increases in one year in the individual market… And my proposal says that if you still can't afford the insurance in this new marketplace, even though it's going to provide better deals for people than they can get right now in the individual marketplace, then we'll offer you tax credits to do so — tax credits that add up to the largest middle-class tax cut for health care in history. After all, the wealthiest among us can already buy the best insurance there is, and the least well off are able to get coverage through Medicaid."

Obamacare has done none of this. Reuters notes: "Insurers including Aetna Inc (AET.N), UnitedHealth Group Inc (UNH.N) and Anthem Inc (ANTM.N) - which has agreed to buy Cigna - say they are losing money on the exchanges because of lower-than-anticipated enrollments. Enrollees are also sicker and older than expected."

Cigna continues to take a loss from their individual plans under Obamacare.

Couple that with the complete collapse of some state exchange programs, such as those in Oregon, Maryland, Massachusetts, and Nevada, and what we are seeing is a not a system under a tremendous amount of strain, but a catastrophic failure in progress. The four aforementioned states lost $474 million in the collapse of their state Obamacare exchanges. And we haven't even touched upon the premium rate hikes for 2017, many of which make Obama's complaints about 39 percent rate hikes seem quaint.

In Tennessee, Cigna and Humana requested rate hikes of 46-percent and 44.3-percent, respectively.
Charles Gaba at ACASighnups.net has run numbers for 49 of the 50 states (excluding Louisiana) and estimates the aggregate 2017 premium rate hike to be 25.1 percent. That's less than what Anthem asked for in California during the original Obamacare debate, but it's still significant and well outside where the CBO projected we'd be today.

The failure of four state exchanges in 2014 should have been the iceberg that sunk this government program, yet the ship has limped. on

Now with premium rate hikes causing rancor among the insured and Cigna and other big insurers either abandoning ship or reducing their exposure on state exchanges, one would think that Obamacare has hit enough icebergs for the politicians to stop re-arranging the deck chairs and make plans to repeal the disastrous law.

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/cigna-news-is-the-latest-iceberg-hit-by-obamacare/article/2606508