Valentine’s Day was Tuesday, but the next day Obamacare was jilted by a longtime lover.
Molina Healthcare, a big Obamacare success story, isn’t committing to offering plans in 2018. The company’s profits tumbled in 2016 due to poor performance in the insurance marketplaces, where the company lost $110 million last year.
The company’s announcement Wednesday afternoon is only the latest insurer trouble to befall Obamacare this week, which is in the crosshairs of Republicans who want to repeal it.
On Wednesday, Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini said Obamacare was in a “death spiral” due to a risk pool with too many sick people in it. Bertolini predicted more insurers would withdraw because of the law’s poor risk pools.
Aetna itself left more than 70 percent of its Obamacare offerings this year because of hundreds of millions of dollars in losses.
The day before Bertolini’s comments, major insurer Humana announced its exit in 2018 from the 11 states it offers Obamacare plans in.
Insurer defections aren’t new to Obamacare, as Aetna left more than 70 percent of its Obamacare offerings this year. United Health also left 34 states in 2017, and Humana left four states this year. Many insurers that stayed in the marketplaces this year raised prices, some as much as 70 percent.
However, Humana’s defection is the first one to occur in the new political environment for Obamacare in which Republican and President Trump plan to repeal and replace the federal healthcare program.
Republicans predictably pounced on Humana’s exit, calling it another failure of the healthcare law and pushed for more calls for repeals.
Enrollment in Obamacare is down this year, with 9.2 million people signing up for health insurance, reflecting 3 million new users. That’s below the 9.6 million who signed up on healthcare.gov for 2016’s coverage year, though the new numbers don’t include data from the 12 state-run exchanges, which will be released soon.
Democrats are using the insurers’ news to attack Republicans for destabilizing the individual marketplace, which is for people who don’t get insurance through their job and includes Obamacare’s exchanges.
“By continuing to pursue a repeal of the Affordable Care Act — without a real plan to replace it — Republicans are effectively forcing insurers to exit the marketplaces, a trend that will continue unless their rhetoric and policies change,” House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer, D-Md., said Tuesday.
Faced with growing discontent among insurers, the Trump administration sought to address concerns by issuing a sweeping proposed rule on Wednesday.
The rule would shorten the open enrollment period for 2018 by a month and a half, making it from Nov. 1 to Dec. 15. It also clamps down on special enrollment periods that allow people to sign up for Obamacare year-round. Insurers have complained that too many people use the special periods to sign up when they get sick and then they leave.
The main insurance lobbying group, America’s Health Insurance Plans, praised the rule Wednesday.
However, critics said the rule puts too much power to insurers and takes it away from consumers.
Obamacare advocacy group Families USA said the rule would make it harder for people to enroll in Obamacare and would raise deductibles but reduce subsidies.
