Health Reform: It wasn’t that long ago when ObamaCare fans were wagging their fingers at critics, saying industry profits proved that the law was working. They’ve been noticeably silent as insurers report huge losses.
“It turns out that the law that the insurance industry’s shills demonized has been awfully good to insurance-company investors.” That was from a piece in the Huffington Post almost exactly a year ago, after UnitedHealth Group released its Q1 earnings.
The writer went on to point out that the good news was reported in the pages of IBD, while our editorial page has long been critical of the law. “I can’t wait,” Wendell Potter concluded, “to see how IBD’s editorial writers spin UnitedHealth’s ObamaCare success.”
We can’t wait to see how Potter and other ObamaCare fans are spinning the law’s “success,” now that insurance companies are showing big, sustained losses and threatening to pull out of the program next year.
The latest to join the list is Humana, which just reported that profits fell 30% in the last quarter of 2015 and has set aside a reserve for expected losses this year. It’s now saying it “continues to evaluate its participation” in the individual insurance market.
A few days earlier, Aetna said it lost up to 4% on its ObamaCare policies in 2015 and said it had “serious concerns about the sustainability of the public exchanges.”
And UnitedHealth Group said it expects losses from its ObamaCare enrollees to top $650 million this year and next. “We cannot sustain these losses,” is how CEO Stephen Hemsley put it.
Humana, as with other insurers, discovered that ObamaCare enrollees were sicker and more expensive to cover than they anticipated. And worse, they’re finding that ObamaCare officials are letting too many people game the system by waiting until after they are sick to enroll for coverage, knowing they can get it guaranteed.
Spiraling premiums, an unstable insurance market, people gaming the system. These were predictions made by ObamaCare’s free market critics, including IBD, who said this is where the law’s mountain of regulations would inevitably lead.
So, what say you now, ObamaCare fans?