The law requires every American to get health coverage or pay a penalty, but the penalty hasn’t been high enough to persuade many Americans to buy into the health plans. Millions of Americans are facing higher costs and fewer choices thanks to its top-down, one-size-fits-all approach.
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If Democrat Hillary Clinton wins the White House, expect her to mount a rescue effort.
“About 629,000 marketplace enrollees who live in primarily rural counties will likely have a single insurer in 2017”, the Kaiser study states, “representing 41 percent of all marketplace enrollees living in mostly rural counties (up from 7 percent in 2016)”. Some smaller insurance companies are following suit, and a new study suggests this might cause a monopoly in public exchanges for a third of the nation’s counties. Citing major losses, the top five insurers – Humana, Anthem, Aetna, UnitedHealth Group, and Blue Cross Blue Shield – have threatened to pull out of the exchanges and have selectively started to do so in many counties.
“The president repeatedly promised that his health care law would provide more choices, ‘bend the cost curve, ‘ and allow Americans to keep the plans they liked and could afford”, Blunt said. Proponents of the law believe that this would drive down costs for consumers and prevent a situation such as Pinal County, Arizona, where there is projected to be no insurer offering plans through the exchange. The people signing up are low-income individuals who receive large subsidies and people with expensive health problems.
They have honed their legislative strategy for repealing most, if not all, of Obama’s law But work remains on key parts of their plan for replacing it. The majority of the 24 state co-ops have ceased operations due to financial difficulties (and one never opened its doors at all), sending shock waves through the insurance market in spite of over .5 billion in taxpayer funded loans and grants.
After being dogged by negative news for the last few weeks – from major insurers pulling out of state exchanges to regulators saying that the exchanges are “near collapse” – the US Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) proposed a series of changes on Monday to try and correct some of the exchange issues. This is a nonpartisan foundation aimed at funding health-care research.
Gallup also recently found the number of Americans who say they’re “satisfied” with the quality of their health care has dropped five percentage points since 2010.
Six years into ObamaCare, most health experts say it is logistically nearly impossible to eliminate the full law.
The public option has always been championed by Democratic politicians.
Elizabeth Warren, that Aetna was using Affordable Care Act customers as “bargaining chips” to get what it wants from the government. And 38% of enrollees may only have two insurers in their exchanges. However, they will get inferior health care.
And as Paul Krugman points out, numerous states fighting Obamacare implementation are the very states that made a federal solution necessary by using their power under the preexisting Medicaid program to shirk health-care access for poor people with serious health problems.
Even her allies find this troublesome.
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The most consequential difference between public and private insurance is the ability to regulate prices.
