SAN FRANCISCO — The CEO of one of the most successful Obamacare insurers cast doubt Tuesday on the ability of Republicans to repeal the healthcare law and criticized some of their replacement ideas.
Michael Neidorff, chief executive of Centene Corp., noted that more GOP senators are expressing deep concerns with repealing the Affordable Care Act without immediately replacing it.
“I don’t think the Republicans even have enough senators at this point,” Neidorff said at the JPMorgan Healthcare Investor Conference.
Sens. Susan Collins, Bob Corker, Lisa Murkowski, Bill Cassidy and Rob Portman have asked Congress to push back an informal deadline for repealing the healthcare law to discuss how to replace it simultaneously.
Neidorff also said that if Congress repeals the law’s Medicaid expansion, it ultimately would make employer-sponsored plans pricier because hospitals would deliver more uncompensated care and pass the costs along to group plans.
Centene, which mostly covers people below 400 percent of the federal poverty level, has been especially successful in the Obamacare marketplaces. The company covers about 600,000 marketplace customers and more than 1 million members of Medicaid expansion programs.
Neidorff also criticized some of the replacement ideas suggested by House Speaker Paul Ryan. Allowing insurers to sell products across state lines would make it harder for consumers to appeal for claims by muddling which state authority they should go to, he said.
And he said that using block grants for Medicaid, an idea that would result in less federal spending on the state-run program, would hurt states with a growing Medicaid population but help those with a shrinking population.
Republicans need to take a second look at that idea, Neidorff said. He said that he doesn’t believe Republicans are willing to bear the blame for upending the law.
“I don’t believe Republicans want to end up owning the healthcare problem,” he said.
