Health insurer Molina Healthcare Inc. on Wednesday projected optimism about participating in the Obamacare marketplaces.
The insurer will be selling healthcare plans again in Utah and Wisconsin for 2019, after leaving the states this year, and Joe Zubretsky, the company’s president and CEO, said on an earnings call that it hoped to expand further in 2020.
“We are pretty comfortable that our strategy in the marketplace … will hold and that will position rates in 2019 that will allow us to grow in 2020,” he said.
The company had scaled back participation, raised premium rates by double digits, unloaded technology that wasn’t delivering on lower costs, and changed which doctors and hospitals it contracted with. For 2019 it will sell Obamacare plans in nine states.
“The marketplace has outperformed our expectations this year,” Zubretsky said.
But Molina also faces more competition this year because more health insurers are selling coverage under Obamacare because the markets are more stable. Zubretsky said the company was focused on retaining its current members and that the company was still seeing how its prices stacked up against competitors.
The company reported a third-quarter net income of $197 million, after reporting a loss in the same period a year earlier. Molina expects full-year earnings between $9.05 to $9.25 per share, with revenue expected to be $18.8 billion.
Molina, an insurer once heralded as an Obamacare success story, left the marketplaces in two states for 2018 after incurring massive losses.
Though Molina is a relatively small insurer, it drew headlines for enthusiastically embracing the law. The company’s former chief executive, J. Mario Molina, was a major industry supporter of Obamacare and he has been a vocal critic of Republican efforts to repeal and replace the law. He and is brother, John Molina, who was chief financial officer, were fired from their positions in May 2017 after poor first-quarter financial results.
