Via CNBC, an appropriate companion story to Moody’s decision to downgrade health insurers’ credit outlook to “negative.” At least one chief executive within the industry is openly warning markets and consumers that actions — and math — have real-world consequences, no matter how hard political actors spin:
That brief excerpt underscores several intractable problems with the president’s healthcare law. (1) The risk pools’ demographics aren’t shaping up to be healthy enough to make the exchanges work well. (2) If insurers eventually begin to sever ties with Obamacare, the remaining plans will face an even more acute scarcity crisis. In other words, “access shock.” (3) Climbing premiums appear to be a fact of life under Obamacare, which was sold as an antidote to the problem. (4) Very few of the “newly” insured within the exchanges were previously uninsured — the very population that this expensive law was ostensibly designed to help. In light of those struggles, Jonah Goldberg poses the rhetorical question that many Americans are asking themselves: So what was the point of Obamacare, again? Bertolini went on to comment that because Obamacare represents such a small sliver of Aetna’s business, the prospect of a health insurance bailout is basically a non-factor for his company. That won’t be the case for other insurers, however, and I’d imagine that a (scheduled) industry bailout won’t go over particularly well with the public, for reasons outlined by Megan McArdle:
Those costs may not be published until 2015. I quoted McArdle’s piece at some length yesterday, and I’d encourage you to read the entire thing. She and another Obamacare opponent debated two supporters of the law on the hyper-liberal, tony Upper West Side of Manhattan earlier in the week. And they won. Here is a digestible highlight reel from the exchange, produced by AEI. McArdle and Dr. Gottlieb prevailed by simply comparing Obamacare to its own benchmarks and promises:
Date: Jan 24, 2014