If Obamacare Bombs, States Must Share the Blame

According to a new Gallup poll, 10.8 Americans are still living without health insurance in 2016, more than half a decade after the president’s health-insurance-for-all program was passed and two years after the law’s individual mandate went into effect.

While the Republican side still insists that a repeal of the Affordable Care Act will take place, reality shows that such an action would strip healthcare coverage from millions of people and a more realistic approach would be to amend some aspects of the ACA.

“I would characterize the exchange market in Tennessee as very near collapse…and that all of our efforts are really focused on making sure we have as many writers in the areas as possible”, McPeak said. Clinton has talked about giving out more generous subsidies, so insurance costs less and more people can afford to buy it.

The insurers that remain are in some cases seeking sharp premium increases for next year, trying to get back in the black amid higher-than-expected costs.

The Obama administration on Monday announced new regulations meant to strengthen the health of the ObamaCare marketplaces and improve the experience for insurers.

“This is only the beginning”.

If that “grim” lack of choice sounds familiar, it’s because it describes Vermont’s long-suffering system.

Kaiser estimates that customers throughout Alabama, Alaska, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Wyoming will have just one insurer in each their respective counties in 2017, and states like Arizona, Mississippi and Missouri will see a marked increase in the proportion of single-insurers counties on their exchanges.

Counties with a single ACA insurer are concentrated in a handful of states this year. The number on the second graph above is an attempt to quantify the extent of the change between the two years, by multiplying the percent of counties in each category in 2016 by one, two or three (depending on the category) and then subtracting the same calculation for 2017.

Oscar Insurance Corp., a hip, tech-driven startup company, recently said it will withdraw from Dallas area and New Jersey, though it is sticking around in New York, San Antonio, Los Angeles and Orange County, California, while expanding into San Francisco. A healthy boost in enrollment would likely signal that healthier people are entering the market.

HHS said some insurers are adjusting to the new market rules better than others. There’s a link between the price increases and the number of insurers, of course, but the drop in options is also a function of big-name insurers, like Aetna, declining to participate in the program.

A key part of President Barack Obama’s domestic legacy is sputtering so badly that even the law’s boosters are admitting that the federal government needs to do more to prop it up. Both Obama and Hillary Clinton have also revived the idea of the so-called public option, which would be a government-run plan that would either compete with or be a substitute for a plan offered by a private insurer. This is a nonpartisan foundation aimed at funding health-care research. He called the Kaiser study “another extraordinary indictment” of Obamacare.