Monday, August 29, 2016

There Is No Fix For Obamacare!

The Weekly Standard ^ | From the 6 Sep, 2016 issue | There Is No Fix 

With Aetna’s announcement that it is pulling out of most government-run exchanges, Obamacare's death spiral has begun to accelerate. Few but the sickest or most heavily subsidized people want anything to do with the (inaptly named) Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act's high-priced, high-deductible, narrow-network plans. Insurers are responding to sicker risk pools and bigger losses by raising rates, which makes the plans even less attractive to the young and healthy—which makes the risk pools sicker, which makes the rates rise further. And the spiral continues, like water circling the drain.
No less of an Obamacare cheerleader than the New York Times's Paul Krugman admits this is "genuine bad news" that shows "some real problems are cropping up." Supporter Charles Gaba calculates that the average requested premium hike in 2017 for Obamacare plans is 24 percent. McKinsey & Company, in an analysis done for the New York Times, found that about 1 in 50 Americans didn't have a choice of insurers under Obamacare last year and thereby faced a private monopoly; next year, McKinsey says, it will be 1 in 6. Pinal County, Arizona, is poised to have no Obama-care plan at all.

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