Humana Bails Out of Obamacare As the GOP Struggles To Find a Solution

Brittany M. Hughes | February 15, 2017
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Another Obamacare provider has officially bitten the dust, as health insurance company Humana announced Tuesday it will be officially withdrawing from the Obamacare marketplace in 2018, a move the company blames on an “unbalanced risk pool” of too many sick people and not enough healthy ones.

From The Hill:

Health insurance company Humana announced Tuesday that it would leave the ObamaCare market in 2018.

The insurer said it would offer plans through 2017, but that the market has not stabilized enough to participate next year.

Humana said it was losing money from taking on too many sick people without enough healthy people to balance the pools.

Humana’s decision to bail out of the Obamacare program entirely comes after several years of the company continuing to scale back its participation in the program. The company offered plans on the exchange in 19 states in 2016; this year, they’re only offering plans in 11 states.

Humana is hardly the only insurance company to either roll back or entirely exit from President Obama’s failing health insurance program over the past two years. Aetna announced back in August it would be scaling back its participation on the exchanges by 70 percent. A month later, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Nebraska pulled its plans from the federal marketplace, stating that while Obamacare plans only apply to about 20,000 of their 750,000 total customers, those plans have cost the insurance company $140 million in the last two years.

In November, Anthem threatened to pull its plans off the marketplace entirely by 2018 if the markets don’t improve.

Alongside health insurance companies who’ve decided the Obamacare program just isn’t sustainable, the number of physicians who say they accept plans offered on the exchanges had plummeted by 20 percent as of last October – meaning that even if you can find a company to insure you and a plan you can afford, you still may not have a doctor who will take it.

Despite Obamacare's continued failures and increasing financial burdens on both insurance companies and individual citizens and families, congressional Republicans, who've long since touted their desire to "repeal and replace" the Affordable Care Act, have yet to present a plan to do so. But faced with ever-increasing premium costs, fewer physicians and hardly any insurance plan options left on the exchanges, Americans have been left to wonder if the bleeding can be stopped before the body runs dry. 

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