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It started in February, when CoOportunity Health, which operated in Iowa and Nebraska, was ordered into liquidation. In July, Louisiana’s insurance department announced it was shuttering that state’s co-op. The following month brought news that Nevada’s co-op would also close. On September 25, New York ordered the shutdown of Health Republic Insurance of New York, which had the largest enrollment of all of the co-ops. Then, within the space of a week in mid-October, the number of failures doubled from four to eight, as state insurance regulators announced that they were closing the co-ops in Kentucky, Tennessee, Colorado and one of the two in Oregon. Last week came news that South Carolina’s co-op will be closed, followed this week by the announcement that Utah’s co-op is also being shut down.

In sum, of the 24 Obamacare co-ops funded with federal tax dollars, one (Vermont’s) never got approval to sell coverage, a second (CoOportunity) has already been wound down, and nine more will terminate at the end of this year.

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Adelberg at FaegreBD has been tracking marketplace newcomers and departures. By his count, at least 13 insurers have announced they’ll leave the Obamacare marketplaces. This figure likely underscores the severity of the problem, as two of those insurers, UnitedHealth and Humana, sell in multiple states.

At the same time, it looks like seven new carriers will come onto the market. But those insurers tend to be smaller, typically selling in just one or two states.

"In 2015 there was a good story about participation going up from 2014," Adelberg says. "And in 2016 there was a good story about holding participation steady amid a shifting market. The story will be harder this time around."

This means there will be more places in the United States where consumers have less choice of plans — if any choice at all. The Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that 664 counties will have a single marketplace insurer in 2017, up from 225 of these counties in 2016.

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One independent metric of ACA's success is The Pulse shooting. NPR had a story on the cost of the massacre, and one fact that came up over and over for surviving victims was how many were NOT covered by health insurance. I thought Obamacare was supposed to fix all that?

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Originally posted by reaverfan:

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One independent metric of ACA's success is The Pulse shooting. NPR had a story on the cost of the massacre, and one fact that came up over and over for surviving victims was how many were NOT covered by health insurance. I thought Obamacare was supposed to fix all that?

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Florida was one of the republican states that did everything they could to fuck up ACA. My state did the same.

So, once again, you can blame Republicans.

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Q: You’ve had really big jobs, you’re around influential people. People whose opinions matter. How do ideas like this that are not backed by theory or practice, how do they get stuck in people’s heads?

A: That’s a good question. And one that I’ve puzzled a lot about. The first thing that really struck me when I went from academia to the White House was that there was almost no one with a scientific background. They were lawyers. And very, very few of the lawyers had majored in any science.

There is something about the mindset of a scientist that is different—an awareness of uncertainty, modeling, proof. I began my career as a physicist. And in the White House my buddies were the people from the White House office of science and technology policy. But a lot of the people were lawyers. They like winning an argument, but science-based, evidence-based reasoning was just sort of not in their framework.

Q: Has that changed much?

A: No. Basically, it’s the nature of who gets drawn into political life. I would say if anything, matters are worse because of the distortions to our society brought about by the financial sector.

The financial sector has so distorted salaries that physicists are getting drawn into the financial sector. All that has led to an undersupply of people committed to the public sector. That filters up into the whole system of who is in government today.

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Originally posted by THGRRI:

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SECOND

The financial sector has so distorted salaries that physicists are getting drawn into the financial sector. All that has led to an undersupply of people committed to the public sector. That filters up into the whole system of who is in government today.

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This reminds me of someone mentioning that as more and more job opportunities became available to women, our education system started to erode in this country.

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Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini sent a letter that politely told the Department of Justice that if it opposed his merger with Humana he would fuck them and Obamacare

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Originally posted by second:

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Originally posted by THGRRI:

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SECOND

The financial sector has so distorted salaries that physicists are getting drawn into the financial sector. All that has led to an undersupply of people committed to the public sector. That filters up into the whole system of who is in government today.

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This reminds me of someone mentioning that as more and more job opportunities became available to women, our education system started to erode in this country.

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Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini sent a letter that politely told the Department of Justice that if it opposed his merger with Humana he would fuck them and Obamacare. When Bertolini was a little boy, he decided to go to business school rather than into the Mafia. He could have been a great gangster. What a sad loss for crime.

Here is Mark Bertolini, Aetna CEO. He planned expanding Obamacare into 5 more states in 2017, but when his merger was not approved, he immediately made a 180 degree turn and left 11 states. It was the code of the Mafia, you hurt me I will hurt you:


www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/aetna-obamacare-pullout-humana-merger_us_
57b3d747e4b04ff883996a13?posfhutkt021brzfr

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:

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Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini sent a letter that politely told the Department of Justice that if it opposed his merger with Humana he would fuck them and Obamacare

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Link please???

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:

It's hard to imagine a CEO of ANYthing that would abandon markets in which it was MAKING MONEY.

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But Mayhew points out something else. Aetna "claims" that they're not really threatening the Obama administration. They're "losing" money! If the merger isn't approved, they really have no choice but to pull back from the exchanges. It's sad, but what are you gonna do?

And yet —— in 2015 Aetna made $13.6 million in the individual market in Pennsylvania

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Originally posted by reaverfan:
Obamacare Has Been Even More Successful Than Expected

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