CNBC: Aetna could be forced out of Obamacare | Hill: Moody Downgrading Insurers Based On ObamaCare Uncertainty

Today In Washington - Jan. 23, 2014
The Senate and House are in recess this week. A pro-forma Senate session will be held Friday at 9:30 AM. The Senate will reconvene on January 27, when it will consider the motion to proceed to S. 1926, the flood insurance bill. A vote is scheduled for 5:30 PM on Monday on cloture on the motion to proceed to S. 1926.

Today brings new reporting on how Obamacare is making a mess of insurance markets, and sadly the ultimate result of these disruptions is usually bad news for American consumers.

According to CNBC, “Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini told CNBC on Wednesday that Obamacare has failed to attract the uninsured, and he offered a scenario in which the insurance company could be forced to pull out of program. The company will be submitting Obamacare rates for 2015 on May 15. ‘Are they going to be double-digit [increases] or are we going to get beat up because they're double-digit or are we just going to have to pull out of the program?’ Bertolini asked in a ‘Squawk Box’ interview from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. ‘Those questions can't be answered until we see the population we have today. And we really don't have a good view on that.’ . . . For Obamacare to work better, it needs more flexibility and choice of insurance programs, Bertolini said. ‘We need to make it a lot more simpler for people. There needs to be more choice. When you get more choice, you make it more of a market and you get more people in the program.’”

And The Hillreports, “Moody’s announced Thursday it was downgrading its outlook for health insurers from stable to negative based on uncertainty related to ObamaCare. The credit rating agency cited an unstable environment because of the healthcare law’s difficult rollout, and projected that insurers would earn 2 percent less than forecast in 2014. ‘While we’ve had industry risks from regulatory changes on our radar for a while, the ongoing unstable and evolving environment is a key factor for our outlook change,’ Moody’s Senior Vice President Stephen Zaharuk said in a statement. ‘The past few months have seen new regulations and announcements that impose operational changes well after product and pricing decisions were finalized.’ The Moody’s report also cites the slow enrollment of young people into ObamaCare as a reason for the downgrade. ‘Uncertainty over the demographics of those enrolling in individual products through the exchanges is a key factor in Moody’s outlook change,’ the ratings agency said. . . . Moody’s also said it was worried that insurers’ premium calculations might not be enough to cover the industry assessment tax that begins in 2014.”

Meanwhile, the parts of Obamacare that have already gone into effect are already hurting Americans with higher prices, canceled insurance plans, and doctors they can’t see. WRAL recently reported on a small business in North Carolina whose health care costs are going up by between $250,000 to $275,000 per year. A man in southern New Jersey found out that his premiums would go up ten times their previous amount.

A Virginia woman told The Virginian-Pilot that “[a]n insurance agent working with the health center gave her a quote for a couple of plans. One cost more than $1,400 a month with a $4,000 deductible, the other more than $600 a month with a $6,000 deductible.” She exclaimed, “Well, Donald Trump couldn't do that.” In California, a “disabled mother of two says she's out of medication for an auto-immune disease, she's run out of antibiotics for a painful internal infection, and the health plan she's paid for through the Affordable Care Act keeps sending her to doctors who say they can't treat her because they won't take her insurance,” according to a KCBS report. Fox News recently reported on a New York woman “diagnosed with breast cancer, whose life-saving surgery has been postponed after she lost her doctors under ObamaCare.” She was “forced to postpone her Jan. 3 biopsy and follow-up treatment at New York's Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, the largest private cancer center in the world, when her insurance rolled over into a new plan that was part of an exchange under the Affordable Care Act.  ‘As of January 1, my insurance plan rolled over into a new ObamaCare plan that is part of the exchange and my doctors are no longer available in my network, so the surgeons that I was dealing with … I no longer have access to,’ Gracchi told Fox News.”

And WKBN in Ohio reported, “Hundreds of people in the Mahoning Valley can no longer go to their trusted doctors, and local officials say the Affordable Care Act is to blame.”

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