Author Topic: UnitedHealth Group May Leave Obamacare Exchanges By 2017  (Read 9856 times)

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Offline Chris_

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UnitedHealth Group May Leave Obamacare Exchanges By 2017
« on: November 19, 2015, 11:30:53 AM »
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UnitedHealth Group May Leave Obamacare Exchanges By 2017

UnitedHealth Group UNH -5.41%, in a surprising announcement, said this morning it has revised its profit expectations for the rest of the year due to what it called a “deterioration” of its individual commercial insurance offerings on government-run exchanges under the Affordable Care Act and offered no commitment it would stay in the business beyond next year.

The nation’s largest health insurer said it was “evaluating the viability of the insurance exchange product segment,” pulling back on its marketing efforts for individual exchange products for next year and “will determine during the first half of 2016 to what extent it can continue to serve the public exchange markets in 2017.” The insurer sells individual plans on public exchanges in 24 states and covers more than a half million Americans in these plans.
Forbes
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Offline obumazombie

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Re: UnitedHealth Group May Leave Obamacare Exchanges By 2017
« Reply #1 on: November 21, 2015, 11:04:09 AM »
Chris_ , you read my mind...
Now, read my post...


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The press's reluctance to relay Obamacare-related bad news has been obvious for years.
Nowhere is this more consistently the case than at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press.

Over half of the state non-profit co-ops set up under Obamacare with $2 billion-plus in taxayer funding are failing.
The AP has generally treated those failures as local stories, even though they relate to the Affordable Care Act, the passage of which they still call President Barack Obama's "signature domestic achievement."

Most of the other co-ops are either incurring huge losses, have become undercapitalized, or both.
So watch, in context, how AP business writer Tom Murphy, in a dispatch primarily about UnitedHealth Group's announcement that "it is pulling back from its push into the Affordable Care Act's public insurance exchanges":

WHY IS IT (i.e., UnitedHealth Group) STRUGGLING?

The insurer has been hurt in particular by customers who signed up for coverage outside the open enrollment window and use more health care in general than those who bought coverage during open enrollment.

Insurers expected challenges as they built this business over the past few years.
They have been struggling, in particular, to attract enough healthy customers to their coverage to balance sicker patients who use a lot of health care.

WHO ELSE IS HURTING?

Several smaller, nonprofit insurance cooperatives said recently that they would stop selling coverage on the state-based exchanges.

Aetna Inc. said last month that its exchange enrollment fell 11 percent in the third quarter, but company leaders also said the exchanges remain a good market.


Obvious problems:

Though readers could infer that the co-ops are involved with Obamacare, Murphy didn't identify them as entities specifically created in the legislation to try to "prove" that non-profit, government-financed entities could show the big, ugly profiteering insurance companies how to run a business efficiently and effectively. (Cue the laugh track.)
The question Murphy asked was:
"Who else is hurting?"
It wasn't: "Who has stopped selling coverage?"

But Murphy wouldn't even answer his own question, only telling readers that "several"
— normally defined as between 2 and 5
— co-ops have stopped selling coverage "recently."
 

The fact of the matter is that, as seen at the following graphic originally found at the Washington Post, 12 co-ops are or will shortly be closing their doors:







Also, as seen above, at least five others are in some degree of trouble.
Perhaps as many as six haven't crossed into the troubled category, but most of their performances have hardly been impressive.

A few, particularly Maryland, Massachusetts, and Oregon, look like they should be classified as troubled.
Deceptions such as these are the exception rather than the rule in the press's coverage of Obamacare developments.

It seems inevitable that some reporter will look at the wreckage of the co-ops and utter that infamous punch line in the joke about surgeons: "The operation was a success, but the patient died."




Let owebumacare die a dignified death that it never had a chance at during it's inception.




full article...


http://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/tom-blumer/2015/11/21/ap-only-tells-readers-several-obamacare-co-ops-are-hurting#sthash.6eTNr1CP.dpuf
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