Posted on 08/08/2016 11:57:00 AM PDT by Lorianne
Competition on the Obamacare marketplaces will decline next year. There will be significantly more places in the country where customers have no choice of health insurance because just one company signed up to sell coverage.
This is the conclusion that health policy experts have increasingly gravitated toward in recent months and weeks, as major insurance companies have announced hundreds of millions of dollars in financial losses on the Obamacare marketplaces.
"Under any likely scenario, there will be less insurer participation in the exchanges in 2017 than there was in 2016," says Michael Adelberg, a senior director at FaegreBD Consulting who previously worked in the Obama administration helping to manage the marketplaces’ launch.
"It seems pretty clear at this point there will be less competition in the marketplaces next year, particularly in rural areas," says Larry Levitt, senior vice president for special initiatives at the Kaiser Family Foundation.
President Obama promised when the marketplaces launched that Americans will find "[m]ore choices, more competition, and in many cases, lower prices." And insurance competition did go up in the first few years of Obamacare. Between 2014 and 2015, the US Department of Health and Human Services estimated that the number of insurance carriers participating in Obamacare increased 25 percent. More health plans wanted in on a new opportunity to sell directly to consumers.
But now some of these gains are backsliding. A recent analysis shows that Obamacare’s marketplaces will have twice as many exits as entrants in 2017. Insurers have tested out Obamacare, and in some cases they’ve lost hundreds of millions of dollars.
(Excerpt) Read more at vox.com ...
lemme guess....if it’s Vox, this is followed by six pages of screeching calls for single payer.
Just remember that 8% rule and you don’t need health insurance, penalty free.
Of course, Obamacare was only a step for a national health plan.
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