March 28, 2024

Two More Insurance Companies Drop Out Of Failing Obamacare Exchanges

Two more insurance companies have announced that they will leave Obamacare’s failing exchanges.

On Monday, The New York Times reported that Wellmark Blue Cross and Blue Shield announced their intention to leave Iowa’s Obamacare exchange next year because they lost $90 million in three years due to most of their enrollees having “expensive medical conditions.”

“Finding solutions to stabilize this market is in the best interest of all Iowans, including providers of health care and insurance carriers,” Wellmark Chairman and CEO John Forsyth said in a statement. “No one really benefits from rising costs. While there are many potential solutions, the timing and relative impact of those solutions is currently unclear. This makes it difficult to establish plans for 2018.”

Wellmark’s departure from Iowa’s Obamacare exchange will affect 21,400 people, but 1.64 million will still be able to receive insurance from Wellmark outside of the Obamacare exchanges.

Only two insurers remain in the Iowa exchange – Aetna and Medica – and it’s uncertain if both will choose to participate in the exchange next year. Medica is still mulling over its options while Aetna “has largely exited the market and declined to comment on its plans,” according to The New York Times.

Wellmark isn’t the only insurer to recently leave a failing Obamacare exchange.

On Friday, it was reported that Anthem Inc. is poised to leave most of the Obamacare exchanges, as they had lost $374 million last year. This is a significant development because, as Guy Benson pointed out at Townhall:

Thanks to Obamacare’s slow-motion implosion, just one single provider remains as a “choice” for consumers who live in roughly one-third of all US counties. In many of those places, Anthem has been that last holdout insurer, which is now reportedly about to end in 2018. Millions of Americans could be left with zero marketplace options, as the planned withdrawal of the last remaining US healthcare giant from most areas marks the latest sign that Obamacare is an unworkable actuarial nightmare.

Anthem and Wellmark will join Humana, Aetna and UnitedHealth as insurers who have fled Obamacare exchanges, reaffirming that the Obamacare death spiral is real and will only worsen from here.

Follow Aaron Bandler on Twitter.

Source: The Daily Wire

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