Another Obamacare Fiasco—-Largest US Insurer Heading For The Exit, from The Wall Street Journal

Obamacare keeps running into reality, and losing. From a Wall Street Journal editorial via davidstockmanscontracorner.com:

President Obama claimed credit at a Los Angeles fundraiser last week for “the steady progress that happens when people who love this country decide to change it,” and reality is unlikely to darken his farewell tour. But for everyone else, note that the largest U.S. health insurer is quitting ObamaCare.

On Tuesday UnitedHealth Group reported a terrific first quarter, with strong performance across nearly all business lines. There was one exception: The conglomerate’s insurance exchange unit raised its projected Affordable Care Act losses for 2016 to $650 million from $525 million, after booking $475 million in red ink last year.

CEO Stephen Hemsley said ObamaCare’s instability, small market size and costly patient population “continue to suggest we cannot broadly serve it on an effective and sustained basis.” He said UnitedHealth will withdraw to “only a handful of states” in 2017.

Liberals claim this doesn’t matter because UnitedHealth was insufficiently committed to ObamaCare, as if it preferred to leave money on the table. The insurer didn’t plunge head-first into the exchanges in year one of the law like the larger industry, but the latecomer expanded to 34 states in 2016 from 23 in 2015 and four in 2014. Mr. Hemsley has been more vocal than most insurance CEOs about the long-term importance of retail, customer-facing coverage outside of the employer business. He told an investors conference last year that he decided to ramp up because he couldn’t believe the ObamaCare market “would form this slowly, be this porous, or become this severe.”

To continue reading: Another Obamacare Fiasco—-Largest US Insurer Heading For The Exit