ACA/Obamacare: Schemes Unravel Then Schemes Implode

“It has not been a good week for the Affordable Care Act (ACA), better known as Obamacare.

A slew of news, from insurers dropping out to possible fraud among healthcare providers, has all accumulated in a deluge of negative headlines for one of President Obama's signature laws.

In fact, it's gotten so bad that it appears that the whole program itself may be in doubt.

While there are issues, and this past week highlighted many of them, it does appear that there is a long road ahead before we have a definitive understanding of Obamacare's survival, and there's a good chance that it makes it.


Obamacare's terrible, no good, very bad week


On Monday night, Aetna announced that it would be dropping around 80% of their policies offered through the ACA's public-health exchanges after sustaining large losses on the Obamacare business.

This makes Aetna the third of the "big five" insurance firms (which includes Humana, United Health Care, Cigna, and Anthem) to announce a serious cut to their Obamacare business.

Whether Aetna did this due to business losses, as the company claims, or because of the Department of Justice's lawsuit blocked their merger with Humana is still up for debate, but regardless, the firm will be out of nearly all of the exchanges by 2017.

In addition to the Aetna news, the New York Federal Reserve put out a study Tuesday that showed one out of every five businesses in the bank's district — which includes parts of New Jersey and Connecticut — said they were reducing hiring due to Obamacare.

On top of all of that, the Center of Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) asked for public comment on instances in which healthcare providers directed patients to Obamacare over Medicare or Medicaid in order to make higher profits.

All in all, not a great week.” - Obamacare has gone from the president’s greatest achievement to a ‘slow-motion death spiral’, business insider.com, 08/21/2016

Link to the entire article appears below:

http://www.businessinsider.com/obamacare-is-in-slow-motion-death-spiral-2016-8


Related article: Aetna Warned U.S. Before Exiting Health Exchanges, WSJ.com, 08/17/2016:

http://www.wsj.com/articles/aetna-warned-it-would-withdraw-from-exchanges-if-humana-deal-was-blocked-1471436663