2017 Obamacare Closes! Premiums rise...Americans cannot afford!

Big PROBLEM looming in 2017! Premiums will skyrocket because the Federal Government will stop insuring Obama Exchanges from losses. Why 2017???? Because Obama, and his henchman will be out of office, and start pointing fingers at the next administration. Here is just one thought….With the huge deficit Obama has run up the next president will be unable to borrow. That means we are all in for less Government spending on everything. Another thought….start firing bureaucrat!  

Most Obamacare insurers lost money

By PAIGE WINFIELD CUNNINGHAM (@PW_CUNNINGHAM) • 7/20/16 5:51 PM

Washington Examiner

A majority of health insurers lost money during the first year of the Obamacare marketplaces, a new study finds.

Two-thirds of the insurers failed to turn any profits from plans they sold to individuals in 2014, although a majority of those insurers didn't profit in the prior year, either, according to a report from the Commonwealth Fund. One-third of the insurers did succeed in turning a profit.

When researchers analyzed data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services on insurers' profits, they found that companies underestimated their spending on the new enrollees by 2 percent. Estimating how much the new consumers would cost was a difficult challenge for insurers, because they had to make all kinds of assumptions about how sick or healthy the new customer base would be.

A federal reinsurance program designed to smooth insurer losses helped ease the way for some insurers in the first few years of the Affordable Care Act's exchanges, the authors noted.

"One insurer can have a very different experience than another, so to draw accurate conclusions about how insurance companies are faring in the ACA marketplaces it's important to look at their experiences comprehensively," said Mark Hall, the study's lead author and a professor at the Wake Forest University School of Law.

"When we do that it is clear that estimating exactly how much these new enrollees would cost them was a challenge but the reinsurance program protected them from large losses on enrollees with high medical costs," he said.

But that reinsurance program ends next year, leading insurers to recently propose bigger premium increases than during the first few years of the exchanges. One major insurer, UnitedHealthcare, is withdrawing from the exchanges next year, citing too-big losses.