Iowa’s dominant health insurance provider will not participate in the government’s health care exchange for the second year in a row.
Wellmark Blue Cross and Blue Shield announced Friday that it would forgo joining the exchange, but CEO John Forsyth told the Register that the company is not ruling it out in the future.
“There’s never been a question of us going on,” Forsyth said. “A year ago we firmly believed we would be sitting here telling you why we are going on (the exchange). … You never say 100 percent we’ll be on next year, but our total intention is to be on next year.”
The system is meant to provide consumers and small companies with an easy way to compare and purchase various insurance policies. By participating in the exchange, consumers would also have access to federal subsidies that would lower the cost of buying individual health insurance.
Forsyth said Wellmark decided not to go on the exchange because problems the system faced during its rocky rollout in October had yet to be fixed.
“The implementation complications are going to be less (in) year two, but they are still going to be a major consequence,” Forsyth said. “It still isn’t going to be as smooth as one would like it to be.”
Without Wellmark, Iowa has two main providers selling insurance on the exchange: CoOportunity Health and Coventry Health Care.
Cliff Gold, CoOportunity’s chief operating officer, said he does not buy Wellmark’s argument that they are forgoing the exchange because of lingering problems. “Now that the website has been totally fixed and no one is having trouble signing up … that is not why they are doing this,” Gold said. “They have denied consistently that what they are trying to do is push bad risk into the exchanges, but that rings pretty hollow right now.”
Date: June 20, 2014