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UnitedHealth Group, the country’s largest health insurer, announced on Thursday that it was expecting to lose $600 million on Obamacare policies in 2016 from the health insurance exchange websites, and may terminate its Obamacare business by 2017. This was a sudden turnabout for the company. It was just a month ago that the company had said in an earnings call that they expected to expand their Obamacare coverage in 2017. According to Dave Wichmann, president and CFO, on October 15: The annual care ratio is being modestly affected by the performance of our new [Obamacare] public exchange benefit programs which...

Marco Rubio conceived and pushed a plan that will all but kill ObamaCare -- and he did it years ago. Thank you. United Health Care, the nation’s largest HMO, delivered bad news to shareholders but good news for ObamaCare opponents yesterday. The company announced their earnings would take a big hit since ObamaCare and the associated marketplaces have not delivered the customers and the profits that starry-eyed fabulists had projected years ago. People are not signing up in droves as Barack Obama and all the Democrats and journalists who peddled ObamaCare promised. Expenses are sky-high because among those people who...

A threat by the nation's largest health insurer to pull out of ObamaCare is a sign of the industry's growing angst about the viability of the federal exchanges, sources close to the industry say. UnitedHealthcare's warning sent new shockwaves across the healthcare sector after weeks of mounting anxiety among private insurers whose participation in the exchanges is critical to the viability of the president's signature law. In the last month alone, insurers have learned that the Obama administration has significantly lowered its expectations for new customers and will have far fewer federal dollars to help cushion insurer losses. "We've been...

In short order, Obamacare is evolving into a Medicaid marketplace. Not only in terms of the design and quality of the narrow-network plans that are being offered, but in the actual carriers that sell those policies. Obamacare’s costly regulations mean that the mix of people who sign up are tending to be older and sicker. Many young and otherwise healthy individuals continue to be priced out of the exchanges, even after the benefit of federal subsidies are baked into their costs. Meanwhile, it’s the Medicaid managed care companies that are growing the number of plans they market on the exchanges....

The New York Times reported this weekend, even the words “affordable” and “care” have turned out to be untrue as well. The sharp rise in premiums has garnered the most headlines in the first three open-enrollment seasons of Obamacare, but equally if not more pernicious has been the increase in deductibles. As Eric Pianin explained for The Fiscal Times on Monday, deductibles have increased an average of 11 percent on Bronze level plans for 2016, intended to be the most affordable of all options, and now average over $5700. For Silver level, deductibles rose 6 percent and now average over...

"We cannot sustain these losses," UnitedHealth CEO Stephen Hemsley said in an investor call Thursday morning. "We can't really subsidize a marketplace that doesn't appear at the moment to be sustaining itself." UnitedHealthcare, the U.S.'s largest health insurer, says that it is considering quitting Obamacare in 2017, just a month after the company said that it planned to expand its presence in the Affordable Care Act's online marketplace. The company said that it is lowering its earnings forecast for the year and expects to make $425 million less than previously estimated, according to Fortune. UnitedHealthcare is also scaling back marketing...

In a profit warning that sent its stock down as much as 7% Thursday, UnitedHealth Group Inc. said that not enough people are signing up under the exchanges set up by Obamacare and that it was considering withdrawing from them. But there was another factor behind the lowered outlook from the nation’s biggest health insurer: people signing up after the open-enrollment period that have higher claims. Or, less charitably—people are gaming Obamacare. In UnitedHealth’s UNH, -5.44% words: “We have identified higher levels of individuals coming in and out of the exchange system to use medical services.” This isn’t supposed to...

If you like your insurance carrier, you can keep your insurance carrier. The nation's largest provider of health insurance announced this morning that it may choose to stop offering individual coverage after 2016, and will "pull back on its marketing efforts" immediately in this market. If the losses continue and United pulls out of next year's exchanges, it will set up a very bad moment for ObamaCare -- and for Democrats just weeks before the election: UnitedHealth Group (NYSE: UNH) today reported revised expectations for 2015, reflecting a continuing deterioration in individual exchange-compliant product performance, and provided an initial outlook...

It is time to come to grips with the inevitable health insurance price increases being caused by the federal Affordable Care Act (ACA) known as "Obamacare." Obamacare's short-term sweeteners and phase-ins are behind us, and the fundamentally flawed structure of Obamacare and its true costs are exposed. The result: substantially increasing individual and small-group health insurance prices. Given the mandates required by the ACA law, these are not likely to recede any time soon. In Minnesota, small-group prices skyrocketed by up to 94 percent in 2014. Individual plans are up by an average 31 percent, and up to 60 percent...

WASHINGTON — Obama administration officials, urging people to sign up for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act, have trumpeted the low premiums available on the law's new marketplaces. But for many consumers, the sticker shock is coming not on the front end, when they purchase the plans, but on the back end when they get sick: sky-high deductibles that are leaving some newly insured feeling nearly as vulnerable as they were before they had coverage. "The deductible, $3,000 a year, makes it impossible to actually go to the doctor," said David R. Reines, 60, of Jefferson Township, N.J., a...

Mountains of Obamacare-related paperwork and the threats of severe fines for the slightest errors are forcing many doctors to retire and others to shut down their practices and work under the protection of hospitals, and all of it spells bad news for patients.Galen Institute President Grace-Marie Turner says the exodus is alarming, as evidenced by a Physicians Foundation report showing the number of doctors who say they run an independent practice has dropped from 62 percent in 2008 to 35 percent in 2014. The survey of 20,000 physicians also shows only 17 percent in solo practice. Eighty-one percent of doctors are at full capacity...

.....Susan L. Donegan was commissioner for Vermont's Division of Insurance in 2013 when she refused to issue a license to the proposed Vermont Health CO-OP.....Today, she looks like a prescient state official who likely saved thousands of Vermonters from buying their health insurance from a doomed insurer. That's because 13 of the 24 co-ops set up under Obamacare have collapsed,costing the federal treasury $1.3 billion. More than 800,000 co-op customers now find themselves without health insurance coverage and are scrambling to find new policies...Turns out that some of the biggest problems she identified two years ago in her state also...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Right here in the New York Times, even today. Paul Krugman -- who hates everything conservative, hates everything Republican, and despises personally Ronald Reagan -- has a piece called, "Despair, American Style." "A couple of weeks ago President Obama mocked Republicans who are 'down on America,' and reinforced his message by doing a pretty good Grumpy Cat impression. He had a point: With job growth at rates not seen since the 1990s, with the percentage of Americans covered by health insurance hitting record highs, the doom-and-gloom predictions of his political enemies look ever more at odds with...

Humana said it will discontinue several products offered on government-run exchanges under the Affordable Care Act, impacting about 100,000 individuals currently covered by the insurer's plans across the country. The move, disclosed this morning in the company's third-quarter earnings report, comes due to higher-than expected medical costs from sick newly insured patients covered under the health law. "Operating results for the company's individual commercial medical business continue to be challenged primarily due to the volatility related to the start of the healthcare exchange program created under the Affordable Care Act as well as the morbidity of membership served under this...

For the fourth time, Obamacare is going before the Supreme Court, this time to decide if forcing religious nonprofit groups to provide contraception against their beliefs is constitutional. Politico: The case represents yet another trip for the Affordable Care Act before the justices since the law's passage more than five years ago — and this one could represent another Obamacare-Supreme Court flash point in an election year. But unlike some of the earlier Obamacare challenges, a ruling against the administration would not cripple the legislation. The law's major provisions, such as the health insurance exchanges, the subsidies and Medicaid...

the so-called Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) has failed. The grand vision of an efficient pseudo-market in health insurance under enlightened federal management — the heart of Obamacare — is not coming to pass. Obamacare, meaning the operating model that undergirded the law that Congress passed and President Barack Obama signed with great fanfare — is dead, and it will not be revived. What remains is fitful chaos.

Open enrollment in the Obamacare-created federal Health Insurance Exchange is scheduled to begin on November 1, and many consumers returning to the exchange or signing up for the first time are in for a rude awakening. Millions of Americans’ health insurance premiums are expected to rise and hundreds of thousands more could find themselves without any health insurance subsidies at all in 2016.

Anthem, the Blue Cross and Blue Shield (BCBS) licensee in Wisconsin, has decided to completely pull out of the health care exchange (individual plans) market place in Milwaukee, Racine and Kenosha counties starting January. Anthem is also significantly cutting back on the number of available exchange plans in 34 Wisconsin counties, which include the Fox Valley, according to Scott Larrivee, Public Relations Director at Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield in Wisconsin. “Anthem individual members in these [Milwaukee, Kenosha and Racine] counties will need to select a new health insurance plan with a different company for 2016,” Larrivee said, noting...

Now that ObamaCare is failing in the exact way its critics predicted more than 5 years ago, the White House is preparing to use threats to increase ObamaCare enrollment numbers next year. The threat, of course, is the ObamaCare tax. Next year the annual fine for not buying President Obama’s overpriced health insurance will jump to $695 or 2.5% of your income, whichever is greater. The White House intends to use the hefty fines as leverage in the upcoming 2016 enrollment period, which starts in November: Administration officials are looking for a balance. “We need to be make sure that...

SNIP In the fall of 2013, our family received notice from Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield of Colorado that we could no longer keep our private health-insurance plan because of “changes from health care reform (also called the Affordable Care Act or ACA).” We liked our high-deductible preferred-provider-organization plan that allowed us to choose from a wide range of doctors. But ObamaCare wouldn’t let us keep it. Reluctantly, and after great bureaucratic difficulty, my hubby and I enrolled in an individual market plan with Rocky Mountain Health, which offered a much narrower provider network than the Anthem PPO plan we...