By Don Irvine.
CBS This Morning host Charlie Rose said Tuesday that health insurance giant Aetna’s decision to scale back its involvement in Obamacare is a ‘big setback” for the health care law:
“One of America’s largest insurance companies is scaling back its involvement in Obamacare. Aetna’s decision is a big setback for the president’s health care law. Aetna says it will only sell 2,017 health insurance plans through the Affordable Care Act in four states.”
Rose then turned to CBS national correspondent Jan Crawford for a report on why Aetna is reducing its participation in a program they eagerly embraced when it was first enacted.
Crawford said that Aetna is currently covering 911,000 Americans in 15 states. That will be reduced to just four states—Delaware, Iowa, Nebraska and Virginia—and “is effectively pulling out of nearly 70 percent of the counties where it offers health plans through Affordable Care Act exchanges.”
She added that Aetna said it just simply “did the math” and that it was too much of a financial hit for the company. Aetna has lost $430 million since the exchanges opened in January 2014.
United Healthcare and Humana have already indicated that they plan to scale back their participation, so Aetna’s decision shouldn’t have come as a surprise.
Aetna Chairman and CEO Mark Bertolini said the company “may expand their coverage again, should there be policy improvements to Obamacare.”
The insurance industry enthusiastically backed Obamacare, thinking that they would add more than enough healthy young customers to offset the previously uninsured and sicker groups that Obamacare was designed to help. But companies in that industry have seen their projections blow up in their face, as far fewer healthy people enrolled in Obamacare, leaving the industry with a costly pool of sick people.
For the liberal media the withdrawal of the major insurance companies from Obamacare has been a bitter pill to swallow, as they had been spreading the lies that Obama and the Democrats were spinning on how this would solve America’s health care crisis. Instead Obamacare has made things worse for millions of Americans.
