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With the September deadline for insurers to decide whether they are in or out of the Obamacare exchanges fast approaching, some insurers are opting to get out now. Aetna announced it was getting out of the Obamacare business in May. Today, the company announced it was leaving the one exchange where it had considered staying because of a Medicaid contract. From the Washington Examiner: The company said during an earnings call that it was withdrawing from the exchange in Nevada, the last state it had considered staying in. Aetna was leaving the possibility open because it was applying for...

Director of insurance says to stabilize the market and reduce rates, Congress should repeal and replace Obamacare! Health care insurers in Idaho have requested premium rate hikes as high as 81 percent for next year, according to the state's Department of Insurance. The five insurers serving the individual market in Idaho are Blue Cross of Idaho Health Service, Mountain Health Co-Op, PacificSource Health Plans, Regence BlueShield of Idaho, and SelectHealth. For all plans, insurers requested rates ranging from a low of 25 percent to a high of 51 percent for a combined average statewide rate increase of 38 percent. For...

Health insurer Aetna announced Thursday that it would completely withdraw from the Obamacare exchanges in 2018, after seeing its profits soar from reducing its participation this year. The company said during an earnings call that it was withdrawing from the exchange in Nevada, the last state it had considered staying in. Aetna was leaving the possibility open because it was applying for a Medicaid managed care contract, and the state gives extra consideration to insurers that participate in both programs.

Only four of the original 24 Obamacare health co-ops remain standing after Maryland’s co-op announced Dec. 8 it was suspending the sale of individual health insurance policies, the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group has found. The four remaining co-ops clinging to financial solvency are in Massachusetts, Montana, New Mexico, Wisconsin.

The economist often referred to as the architect of Obamacare called Donald Trump's healthcare policy incoherent on Monday, firing back at the GOP nominee for criticizing him during Sunday night's debate. "My only comment is that last night showed the difference between a candidate with a strong and coherent health care agenda [Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton] and one with a garbage salad of right-wing talking points," Jonathan Gruber said in the Boston Business Journal. Gruber is an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who played a pivotal role in crafting the Affordable Care Act. He said several years...

New York magazine published an interview with President Obama Sunday night which is really Obama recounting some of the high profile political arguments of his tenure. One of the arguments which gets a lot of space is Obamacare. Here’s a sample picking up from the moment Scott Brown won a special election which ended Democrats’ 60 vote majority in the Senate: The most important phone call I made after that was to Nancy Pelosi, because the question I posed to her and to Harry Reid was, “Are you guys still game? Because if you guys are still game, we’ll find...

Blue Cross Blue Shield of Nebraska said Friday it won’t sell individual health insurance on the Affordable Care Act marketplace next year because of continuing losses. Blue Cross’ departure removes the state’s largest health insurer from the individual marketplace, leaving only Aetna and Medica Health to offer individual policies on the Nebraska’s exchange for 2017. Steve Martin, the chief executive of Blue Cross, told The World-Herald that the company has lost $140 million on the exchange policies since 2014. If the trend continued, losses could total $250 million by the end of 2017, he said. As of this year, around...

The Obamacare insurance co-ops have collapsed. Of the original 23, only three are expected to survive past 2017. The insurance companies are losing hundreds of millions of dollars on the healthcare insurance exchanges. Their reaction is to pull out of a number of them in order to reduce their exposure; a process they repeatedly employ to shed under-performing products called “purging”. To make up for these losses, insurers are expected to raise 2017 premiums across the board on all policies. The Kaiser Foundation expects an average increase of nine percent for policies on the exchanges, but in the individual market,...

On Tuesday, the largest private health insurance provider in the U.S., United Healthcare, announced that it would be pulling its plans out of the ObamaCare exchanges in all but a few states. Among a continuing string of bad news for President’ Obama’s Affordable Care Act, this one should stand out as an indicator that the ACA’s collapse is accelerating. Conservatives need to be ready to explain why and to present solutions, because advocates for fully socialized medicine will be ready to turn the collapsing exchanges to their advantage. All of the deficiencies in Obamacare’s structure have been well documented. High...

ObamaCare’s collapsing. UnitedHealth announced it will abandon most ObamaCare markets. Giant insurers like Aetna and the BlueCross Blue Shield Association are next. They warned last week losses trying to sell ObamaCare plans are “unsustainable” and they’ll either stop selling the plans or significantly raise premiums. Even Hillary Clinton’s campaign admits the cost of ObamaCare is “crushing.” Six years of ObamaCare have taught the nation lessons that Republicans should not ignore. Keep it short: Don’t give us another 2,572-page “comprehensive” health bill that lawmakers vote on without reading. What Congress passes, Congress must live by: Under Obamacare, members of Congress and...

Circumventing Congress's ban on the use of federal money to bail out ObamaCare casualties. I’m sure you’re all quite familiar with the Obama Administration’s proclivity for ignoring Congress and doing whatever it wants, whether that means refusing to enforce the law or attempting to shove gun control down the nation’s throat. But if you think Obama only does this via executive orders, you haven’t quite grasped the full scope of his lawlessness. Let’s say you want to spend money to bail out health insurers that you have driven to the brink of ruin by passing ObamaCare. But Congress (thanks in...

Two weeks ago we reported that after its November warning that it may exit certain Obamacare markets as a result of substantial losses, the largest U.S. health insurer UnitedHealth, did just that when it announced it would no longer sell plans for next year in Georgia and Arkansas. Then over the weekend, UnitedHealth also added Michigan to the list of states whose Obamacare market it would no longer service. As Bloomberg reported, "the insurer won’t sell policies through Michigan’s ACA exchange for next year, according to Andrea Miller, a spokeswoman for the state’s Department of Insurance and Financial Services. Georgia...

UnitedHealth is withdrawing from most of the 34 ObamaCare Exchanges in which it currently sells, citing losses of $650 million in 2016. A recent Kaiser Family Foundation report indicates UnitedHealth’s departure will leave consumers on Oklahoma’s Exchange with only one choice of insurance carriers. Were UnitedHealth to exit all 34 states, the share of counties with only one or two carriers on the Exchange would rise from 36% to 52%, while the share of enrollees with only one or two carriers from which to choose would nearly double from 15% to 29%. The Obama administration dismissed the news as unimportant. A spokesman professed...

The nation’s largest insurer announced Tuesday it will be dropping out of the Obamacare exchanges in all but a handful of states. The decision comes after the company lost nearly half-a-billion dollars on the exchange business last year and expectations it will lose even more this year. The AP reports: UnitedHealth Group Inc. said it now expects to lose $650 million this year on its exchange business, up from its previous projection for $525 million. The insurer lost $475 million in 2015, a spokesman said.UnitedHealth has already decided to pull out of Arkansas, Georgia and Michigan in 2017, and...

UnitedHealth, the nation's biggest health insurer, will remain in public health insurance exchanges in only a handful of states next year after expanding to 34 this year. CEO Stephen Hemsley told analysts Tuesday morning that the company cannot continue to broadly serve the market created by the Affordable Care Act's coverage expansion due in part to the higher risk that comes with its customers. The state-based exchanges are a key element behind the Affordable Care Act's push to expand insurance coverage. But insurers have struggled with higher than expected claims from that business. UnitedHealth Group Inc. has estimated that it...

Two weeks ago we reported that after its November warning that it may exit certain Obamacare markets as a result of substantial losses, the largest U.S. health insurer UnitedHealth, did just that when it announced it would no longer sell plans for next year in Georgia and Arkansas. Then over the weekend, UnitedHealth also added Michigan to the list of states whose Obamacare market it would no longer service. As Bloomberg reported, "the insurer won’t sell policies through Michigan’s ACA exchange for next year, according to Andrea Miller, a spokeswoman for the state’s Department of Insurance and Financial Services. Georgia...

UnitedHealth, the nation's biggest health insurer, will cut its participation in public health insurance exchanges to only a handful of states next year after expanding to nearly three dozen for this year. CEO Stephen Hemsley said Tuesday that the company expects losses from its exchange business to total more than $1 billion for this year and last. He added that the company cannot continue to broadly serve the market created by the Affordable Care Act's coverage expansion due partly to the higher risk that comes with its customers. UnitedHealth Group Inc. said it now expects to lose $650 million this...

With the mainstream media, at least the majority that is left of center, flooded with story after story touting Obamacare's success, the news coming this morning from Denver that Colorado's largest nonprofit health insurer and participant in that state's insurance exchange Colorado HealthOP is abruptly shutting down, forcing 80,000 Coloradans to find a new insurer for 2016, was a slap in the face for the Obama administration's crowning achievement. According to AP, the health insurer announced Friday that the state Division of Insurance has de-certified it as an eligible insurance company. That's because the cooperative relied on federal support, and...

Nearly a third of the innovative health insurance plans created under the Affordable Care Act will be out of business at the end of 2015, following announcements Friday that plans in Oregon and Colorado are folding. In just the past week, four co-ops, as the nonprofit plans are known, have decided or been ordered to shut down. Their demise means that eight of the 23 co-ops in existence a year ago will be unavailable to consumers shopping for 2016 coverage through insurance marketplaces created under the ACA