Health Reform: Two Blue Cross plans made the stunning announcement in the past week that they were dropping out of ObamaCare markets. If even the Blues — the backbone of the individual insurance market for decades — can't make it, ObamaCare is truly on the road to ruin.
Blue Cross was once thought to be ObamaCare's firewall. If for-profit insurers decided to drop out of the exchanges, at least these venerable nonprofits would remain to provide coverage.
But that's not the case anymore. Despite getting approval on an eye-popping rate hike of nearly 60% for 2017, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Tennessee announced that it was quitting three of the largest ObamaCare markets in the state, which will leave 100,000 enrollees to scramble for an alternative coverage next year.
The state's Blue Cross had lost half a billion dollars in ObamaCare's first three years, and the company's spokesman said "there are too many uncertainties to continue participating on a statewide level as we have before."
That decision came shortly after Blue Cross Blue Shield of Nebraska's announcement that it was pulling out of ObamaCare entirely in that state — stranding some 20,000 ObamaCare enrollees — after losing $140 million. "We can't take another hit," said CEO Steve Martin last Friday. The decision came after the company had won approval for a 42% premium increase.
These dropouts are on top of the June announcement that Minnesota's Blue Cross was abandoning the states individual market entirely in the wake of $500 million in losses, which means more than 100,000 people in the state will be looking for a new insurer for next year.
That same month, Arizona's Blue Cross announced that it was dropping out of two counties — Maricopa and Pinal. It later decided to get back into Pinal County after Aetna fled the state, which would have left Pinal with zero insurers in the ObamaCare exchange.
In North Carolina, Blue Cross was contemplating an exit until other insurers dropped out, leaving it the sole carrier in much of the state.
As Douglas Holtz-Eakin of the American Action Forum put it, "This is a striking indictment of ObamaCare because the Blue plans were the backbone of the individual market prior to the Affordable Care Act and the largest participants in the exchanges."
Worse, these departures mean still fewer choices for those stuck in ObamaCare. Even before the latest pullbacks, 974 counties in the U.S. — which represent 31% of all counties — were down to one ObamaCare insurer after Aetna, UnitedHealth, Humana and others pulled out of various states, and after most of the ObamaCare-created insurance co-ops failed, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. Another 31% of counties will be stuck with just two insurers.
Almost all of the insurers who are sticking it out for next year have put in for, and are getting approved, rate increases on a scale unheard of before ObamaCare's "reforms" kicked in — which means that millions of Americans will have no choice but to buy an ObamaCare plan from a monopoly provider at exorbitant rates, or pay a stiff tax penalty.
To say this isn't what President Obama and his fellow Democrats promised the nation when they shoved ObamaCare down its throat would be the understatement of the decade.
The question now isn't whether ObamaCare is failing, it's what comes next. Voters need to be aware of the stakes when they go to the voting booth in November.
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