Thursday, January 23, 2014

Aetna may pull out of Obamacare

Noting that only 11% of Obamacare enrollees were uninsured prior to buying insurance on the public exchanges Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini warned of double digit rate increases for 2015.
"We see only 11 percent of the population is actually people that were firmly uninsured that are now insured. So [it] didn't really eat into the uninsured population."
Using the HHS number of 2.2 million that means that for all the expense and pain Obamacare only managed cut into the uninsured population by less than 250,000. One must assume that the remainder of enrollees were buying their own insurance without subsidies but are now subsidized but may still have greater out of pocket cost for inferior coverage.
As a result of the higher rates Aetna may withdraw from the exchanges next year.
"Are they going to be double-digit [increases] or are we going to get beat up because they're double-digit or are we just going to have to pull out of the program?"
Aetna has been chary of participating in Obamacare and only sells into 15 markets.

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