Another Insurer Walks Away from ObamaCare

The nation’s largest health insurer, UnitedHealthcare Group, made headlines last month with anannouncement that the company was considering pulling out of ObamaCare. Now, Cleveland-based health insurer HealthSpan is actually doing what UnitedHealthcare threatened, disbanding its network of physicians and announcing that it will no longer participate in the individual markets under ObamaCare. In addition to dropping individual plans by the end of the year, HealthSpan will stop covering small businesses by January 31st.

The company’s decision is motivated by increasing costs in the individual and small group insurance markets, and the need to remain competitive. HealthSpan has laid off employees as part of its scaling back. It remains unclear how many of the company’s 200,000 clients will be affected by this decision.

The implications of these kinds of withdrawals are obvious. When insurance companies go bust, prices will rise even further and access to medical care will be harder to obtain. The irony of the Affordable Care Act having the precise opposite of its stated goals should not be lost on readers. It’s part of a continuing pattern we’ve seen over the last several years. Premiums and deductibles go up, people unable to afford the cost decline to sign up, insurance companies and co-ops fold, cost go up again, rinse, repeat.

http://www.freedomworks.org/content/another-insurer-walks-away-obamacare?source=FWFBocareinsurerBlog