SAN FRANCISCO — If Congress is going to repeal Obamacare, it must offer a replacement immediately and avoid reversing recent coverage expansions, the CEO of health insurer Kaiser Permanente said Monday morning.
Bernard Tyson, chief executive of one of the country’s largest nonprofit insurers, said he doesn’t want the Affordable Care Act to be repealed, calling it “a great step forward.”
But if Republicans are going to ditch the law, their replacement must give at least as many people access to “the front door of the American healthcare system,” said Tyson, speaking at the JPMorgan Healthcare Investor Conference.
“If the reality is this bill will be repealed, our position is at the same time … it must be replaced,” Tyson said. “And it is my hope the replacement is starting from where we are, not a step backwards.”
Kaiser, which is California’s largest private employer, covered about 860,000 people on the individual market last year, mostly enrollees in the state’s Obamacare marketplace. While several other insurers have pulled back from the marketplaces, Tyson has said his company is committed to the exchanges over the long term.
Last year, Tyson told Modern Healthcare that Kaiser has made a “slight margin” overall on its Affordable Care Act plans. He said Monday that it’s too early to “reconcile” all the economics of the marketplaces, which have generally suffered from an imbalance of healthy versus sick employees.
“We all in the industry will come together and tell you it wasn’t perfect and it is not perfect today, but it is a great step forward,” Tyson said.
