A McKinsey study shows Obamacare insurers lost money in 2014 and the losses doubled in 2015.
Amazingly, the study concludes there’s nothing to worry about because “30 percent of insurers nationwide were profitable.”
Meanwhile, outright refusals to accept Obamacare mount. “Sorry, We Don’t Take Obamacare” is now a frequent response.
Losses Pile Up
The Hill reports Study Shows ObamaCare Insurers’ Losses Grew in 2015.
The study from McKinsey & Company finds that in 2014, insurers had a margin of minus-4.8 percent, translating to an overall loss of $2.7 billion on the individual health insurance market, which includes ObamaCare’s marketplaces.
The study finds those losses roughly doubled in 2015 to between minus-9 and -11 percent margins, based on preliminary data.
Still, the study finds that not all insurers lost money. In 45 states, there was at least one profitable insurer in the market in 2014, and 30 percent of insurers nationwide were profitable.
“The individual market has little risk of entering a classic insurance ‘death spiral’ as long as the federal government continues to offer subsidies,” the study states, adding that “there will likely continue to be a large, viable individual market.”
Second Class Patients
The New York Times tells the sad tale of an increasing number of “Sorry, We Don’t Take Obamacare” responses to those seeking medical assistance.
AMY MOSES and her circle of self-employed small-business owners were supporters of President Obama and the Affordable Care Act. They bought policies on the newly created New York State exchange. But when they called doctors and hospitals in Manhattan to schedule appointments, they were dismayed to be turned away again and again with a common refrain: “We don’t take Obamacare,” the umbrella epithet for the hundreds of plans offered through the president’s signature health legislation.
Though their insurance cards look the same as everyone else’s — with names like Liberty and Freedom from insurers like Anthem or United Health — the plans are often very different from those provided to most Americans by their employers. Many say they feel as if they have become second-class patients.
Compared with the insurance that companies offer their employees, plans provide less coverage away from patients’ home states, require higher patient outlays for medicines and include a more limited number of doctors and hospitals, referred to as a narrow network policy. And while employers tend to offer their workers at least one plan that allows them coverage to visit doctors not in their network, patients buying insurance through A.C.A. exchanges in some states do not have that option, even if they’re willing to pay higher premiums.
Some of the problems may have been predictable. When designing the new plans, for-profit insurers naturally tended to exclude high-cost, high-end hospitals with whom they had little clout to negotiate discounts. That means, for example, that as of late last year none of the plans available in New York had Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in their network — an absence that would be unacceptable to many New York-based employers buying policies for their employees. Another issue is out-of-state coverage, which many A.C.A. plans don’t offer aside from emergencies, and which is routinely offered in policies from companies — especially large ones — with workers in more than one state.
As a result, many parents who were excited that they would be able to keep their children on their policies until age 26 have discovered that this promise has gone unfulfilled. When Sara Hamilton of New York was shopping on the exchange for a plan to cover her and her two young-adult children — who live in distant states — she discovered that none of the plans covered doctor visits in those places.
In 2013, Angie Purtell of Tega Cay, S.C., bought a gold plan offered by Coventry Health Care. When notified that the plan would double its monthly premium the following year, to nearly $1,000, she went shopping again on the state exchange and chose a Blue Cross silver plan for $500. It was branded “Choice.”
But when she tried to visit her longtime doctor using the new plan, she found she could not. The doctor’s practice, while in South Carolina, was not covered because it is affiliated with the Carolina Medical Center, a few miles over the border in Charlotte, N.C.
Service Refused
Hey! We don’t serve their kind here. They’ve got Obamacards.
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Mike “Mish” Shedlock
