The Department of Health and Human Services says consumers are still better off than they were prior to Obamacare, though GOP critics say President Obama’s vision of a competitive new marketplace is falling far short. Companies including UnitedHealth Group Inc., Humana Inc. and Aetna Inc. have cited their losses in withdrawing from ACA marketplaces, as have smaller insurers that have been retreating, or even shutting down. These figures are sharply up from the current year, when 7 percent of counties had one insurer and 29 percent had two.
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The number of counties in America that have a single insurer participating in the exchange is astronomically higher in 2017, the research indicates. The red county on the 2017 map is Pinal County, Ariz., where KFF estimates no insurers are now planning to participate in the exchange.
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.
A single payer system would help to address the access and cost problems of our health care system, and potentially the outcomes as insurance status, cost and access have been clearly shown to effect health care outcomes.
It also estimated that “Approximately 6 in 10 counties could have 2 or fewer marketplace insurers in 2017”.
Requiring insurance companies that offer a bronze plan in an exchange – the lowest level of coverage – to also offer silver- and gold-level plans.
Along with Tennessee, four other states are expected to have just one carrier on the 2017 Obamacare exchanges, and consumers in most counties in nine other states won’t have competition for their exchange business either. A lot of the reason that health insurance is so expensive in the United States is that doctors and hospitals charge more here than their counterparts in other countries.
Still, providing coverage on the individual exchanges remains a struggle.
In a January 7 memo requesting an explanation from TDCI for the steep premium increases approved in 2015, Senator Green noted constituent complaints from within his district and recorded in press accounts from across the state due to premium increases “as great as 56 percent”. And so they did – by passing an Affordable Care Act that is one of the great misnomers in the history of major American legislation. They are a small minority of people now in the marketplaces, but they make up more than a third of all people buying their own insurance, according to recent estimates. Since the act has become law, about 20 million Americans got health insurance from the marketplace. Letting the states – and yes, particularly the states of the former Confederacy – call the shots on indigent health care has been an ongoing disaster.
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So it’s critical that more of the 28.6 million folks who remain uninsured sign up when open enrollment begins in November, which is prompting the administration to roll out a big push later this year.
