UnitedHealth CEO regrets entering ObamaCare

The CEO of UnitedHealthCare on Tuesday said he regretted the decision to enter the ObamaCare marketplace last year, which the company says has resulted in millions of dollars in losses.

“It was for us a bad decision,” UnitedHealth CEO Stephen Hemsley said at an investor’s meeting in New York, according to Bloomberg Business.

UnitedHealth, the country’s largest insurer, announced last month that it would no longer advertise its ObamaCare plans over the next year and may pull out completely in 2016 — a move that sent shockwaves across the healthcare sector.

United Health Care participated voluntarily.  The rest of us participate under duress.

Who wants to bet that this is a disguised demand for a government bailout?

14 ways to avoid Obama Care (90% of the nation's 30 million uninsured won't pay a penalty)

Remember that the primary objective of Obama Care was to get every American insured?  

Well, fuggedaboutit.  

Obama Care was supposed to fine you if you didn't get insured under one of the plans.  But reality intruded.  From the Wall Street Journal.

Almost 90% of the nation's 30 million uninsured won't pay a penalty under the Affordable Care Act in 2016 because of a growing batch of exemptions to the health-coverage requirement.

Here's a partial list of exemptions that allow you to avoid the fines:

• domestic violence
• property damage from a fire or flood
• having a canceled insurance plan
• be an illegal immigrants
• be a Native American
• be part of  religious sects
• be a low earner

There are at least 14 ways you can ignore the Obama Care mandate that you have insurance. The insurance industry supported the law, figuring that they could get millions of new customers.  It looks as if they were also taken in by Obama's lies, along with the rest of America.

The exemptions are worrying insurers. The penalties were intended as a cudgel to increase the number of people signing up, thereby maximizing the pool of insured. Insurers are concerned that the exemptions could make it easier for younger, healthier people to forgo coverage, leaving the pools overly filled with old people or those with health problems. That, in turn, could cause premiums to rise.

 ...

"If your pajamas don't fit well, you don't need health insurance," said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, former director of the Congressional Budget Office and president of the American Action Forum, a conservative think tank. "It basically waives the individual mandate."

The primary effect of Obama Care for most Americans has been in sharp increase in the cost of insurance, the loss of their doctor, the loss of the policies they liked chaos in America's health delivery system. 

TARP Was Bad, but the Looming Obamacare Bailout for Corrupt Insurance Companies Could Be Worse

My doctor dislikes insurance companies and a few years ago dropped out of the system.  I never had a problem with them; they always paid what they said they would and I have had my share of claims.  But it seems that the industry decided to get behind ObamaCare ... with an eye toward getting a government bailout if things did not go well, and I understand why my doctor disliked health insurance. 

First big banks were the beneficiaries of Crony Capitalism, now it's Big Insurance.  Read the article by Dan Mitchell, then laugh at the cartoons.  

An example

Poll: Health Law Hurts President Politically

Disapproval of Mr. Obama's job performance hit an all-time high in the poll, at 54%, amid the flawed rollout of the health law. Half of those polled now consider the law a bad idea, also a record high.

Gee, ya think?  Let's see, losing the policy you like, losing the doctor you liked, having to pay higher premiums or losing your insurance altogether. What's not to like?

Insurance companies would be insane to offer plans that failed to comply with the ACA.

Andy McCarthy

As a practical matter, it is nearly inconceivable that insurance companies would be able to reissue the canceled health-care plans. The process, as Avik Roy expertly explains, is too extensive and complex to complete in the few weeks between now and Obamacare’s coverage deadline — something that an administration that can’t, after three years, get a functioning website running should know. But even if it could be done, the insurance companies would be insane to offer plans that failed to comply with the letter of the Obamacare statute. Similarly, the state insurance commissioners would be insane to permit them, and Americans would be insane to buy them. The policies would be legally unenforceable.

 

Repeat:  The policies would be legally unenforceable.  Policies that don't comply with the law can't be enforced in court.  For example, you can't sue a hit man for failing to kill someone if he signed a contract to do so.  If a woman buys a policy that does not cover maternity care so that she will get a lower premium can sue the insurance company for maternity care because the insurance company issued an illegal policy.  

 

To repeat: insurance companies would be insane to offer plans that failed to comply with the letter of the Obamacare statute. Similarly, the state insurance commissioners would be insane to permit them, and Americans would be insane to buy them.

Gallup Poll: Very Little Interest in Obamacare, Among the Uninsured

Wait.  What? 

Gallup published a new poll Friday which shows that the people the Obamacare exchanges were designed to help, the uninsured, are mostly ignoring the sites.

Just 18 percent of uninsured Americans have attempted to use the exchanges in the five weeks since they opened. Slightly more, 22 percent, have tried among those who are uninsured and say they plan to buy insurance.

For the first two weeks of the roll out the White House eagerly spread the story that unexpected and overwhelming demand was responsible for the website issues. Various news outlets have since revealed problems with the rollout schedule which meant the sites crashed under as few as 200 people.

Gallup completely undercuts the claim of overwhelming popular demand concluding the exchanges have "generated relatively little interest or use among uninsured Americans -- the primary target group..."

Gallup:

Gallup previously found that less than half of uninsured Americans (44%) who plan to get insurance say they will do so through an exchange, and about one in four say they are more likely to pay a fine instead of getting insurance. These findings help explain the low percentage of the uninsured who have attempted to access the exchange websites.

Top Ten Excuses for Obamacare Cancellations

Despite President Obama's lies about being able to keep your insurance policy and your doctor if you like them, now that that the cancellations are pouring in, here are the top ten excuses Democrats are giving.

1. “Transitioning”

Americans aren’t receiving “so-called cancellation notices”; they’re getting help “transitioning” off their previous plans

2. “Bad-apple Insurers”

3. “Conversion Letters”

During her weekly press conference, Nancy Pelosi attempted to correct reports of cancellation letters by referring to them “conversion letters.”

4. “Five Percent”

President Obama, Pelosi, and other Democrats have tried to downplay the scale of the cancellation problem by suggesting “fewer than 5 percent” of Americans will be affected.

5. “Substandard”

On Tuesday, White House press secretary Jay Carney explained that “substandard plans” would be terminated

6. “A Fraction of a Fraction”

Later in the week, on Thursday, Carney said Americans losing their current healthcare plans were a “fraction of a fraction” of the population during Thursday’s daily briefing.

7. “Scam”

Representative Frank Pallone (D., N.J.) called pre-Obamacare insurance plans “a scam”

8. “That’s Not Health Insurance”

James Carville argued that the plans that were canceled actually weren’t “health insurance,”

9. “Empty”

Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick told MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell that previous plans were “empty,”

10. Only “Good Insurance”

Democratic senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, whose tough reelection effort next year is sure to focus on Obamacare, claimed that her party’s vow was much more qualified than it sounded to most observers. “We said when we passed that, ‘If you had insurance that was good insurance that you wanted to keep it, you could keep it,’

ObamaCare sticker shock. State run media beginning to notice.

Who could have seen this coming?

Michael Yount of Charlotte, N.C., is one such unhappy customer. He and his wife, retired and in their late 50s, have been buying their own health insurance from Blue Cross and Blue Shield (BCBS) in North Carolina, paying about $380 a month with an $11,000 deductible. BCBS is offering them a new plan for three times the cost, $1,124.50 a month, still with an $11,000 deductible.

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“We are an insurance company’s dream,” Mr. Yount tells the Monitor. “We pay our bills, we hardly ever get sick, no prescription drugs. And now this.”

Reluctantly, he says, they plan to drop out of formal health insurance, pay the penalty, and “self-insure.”

“No question, there’s risk there,” Yount says. “The question is, how much are you willing to pay someone else to mitigate that risk?”

He also understands that the law is meant to help those who have not been able to buy insurance because of preexisting conditions. But he objects to how it’s being done.

“If the only way to get it to them is forcibly taking it from everybody else, how is that any better?” Yount says. “I’m struggling with what is the greater evil and injustice. I don’t think it’s any more right to take it from one person forcibly. It’s coercion.”

Just keep repeating: "law of the land."

Mandating health care

 

Megan McArdle has an column (hat tip to Glenn Reynolds) entitled Fixing the Mandate from Hell. In it she refers to a column by Ezra Klein that brought me us short.  I run a small business and one thing Ezra Klein, the Wunderkind at the Washington Post, wrote  made me go "whoa."

Ezra Klein is a very good example of someone who has never been in business and who makes colossal analytical errors as a result. For example this comment is, frankly, amazing if you think about it:

"In Massachusetts, the employer mandate has been a success with a piddling $295 penalty."

I have no idea what that means because Klein doesn't bother to define "success." But from an economic perspective the comment is nonsense. The cost of insuring an employee is somewhere in the $10,000 per year range (often more), give or take a few thousand. Apparently Klein believes that a businessman would try to avoid a $295 penalty by shelling out $10,000. That's stupidity on steroids.

Let me tell you why employers, especially small businesspeople, will offer health insurance. They offer it to their employees so that they can cover themselves and their families using the business to pick up the bill. They are required to offer the same benefit to all full time employees if they offer it to themselves.

There can be other reasons, such as wishing to attract the right kind of employees who expect health insurance benefits, or even just being kind. But the idea that anyone with a brain would spend $10,000 to save $295 is one of those really foolish ideas that only people like Klein would write, figuring that few people would actually stop and think ... "What the hell?"

 

The cost of health insurance also explains why employers who don't provide company paid health insurance will go to great lengths to avoid it.  If you run a small shop, work there yourself, and have just a few employees you may want to give them the benefit of health insurance while covering yourself .  As the number of  employees grows the cost of insurance grows astronomically, often rivaling the cost of the pay for lower wage employees.  At that point, simple math points to buying your own insurance with after-tax dollars and not offering your employees health insurance.  

 

The ObamaCare penalty for failure to provide health insurance is very low.  There is no financial incentive to provide health insurance and every incentive to stop providing it.   As Nancy Pelosi said, now that they've passed the bill we're finding out what's in it.  For many employees, it spells the end of company paid health care.