Stocks panic as United Healthcare merely THINKS about dropping out of Obamacare.

Redstate ^ | November 19th, 2015 | Moe Lane

[JSDude1]

The very short version: United HealthCare is the biggest health care insurance provider in the country (something like 70 million people, apparently). It is huge, it is influential, it is weighty. And UHC took a $425 million dollar haircut last year in the Obamacare exchanges, so now it’s thinking of stopping selling on the exchange by the end of next year.

Note that UHC did not say that they would, merely that they might. They did this at a shareholders’ meeting, too; which suggests that a large part of that might have been due to UHC’s awareness that people were going to freak over the noticeably reduced earnings this quarter. Guess how the market reacted anyway?

As you can see; not very well. UHC didn’t really fully join in on the exchanges when they were set up in the first place: they gingerly set up a few test markets in 2014 and then expanded in 2015. And now the company apparently has realized that the pool that they jumped into is in fact made out of acid and flesh-eating bacteria (work with me, here); so even the idea of them running, screaming, from that pool would obviously make investors in the other, smaller companies highly nervous. If the biggest players can’t make the system work, what happens to the players who are more locked into that system?

[The Westerner]

I’m glad you found it helpful. His father was a poor immigrant who put himself through medical school and surgical school. He became one of the top surgeons in Manitoba, but when Canada took over his clinic under Socialized Medicine, he moved and opened a practice in the still “free” medical system in America. There is nowhere left to go, and when my practice gets taken over under single payer, I’m quitting.