THAT MEANS IT’S WORKING: ObamaCare coverage options disappearing across country, report finds.
The Kaiser Family Foundation study found that overall, 31 percent of counties will have just a single insurance option within the Affordable Care Act exchanges. That’s up from 7 percent this year — and underscores a problem many analysts have been warning about for years.
Further, about six in 10 counties could have two or fewer marketplace insurers in 2017, with the “bulk of the increase in single-insurer counties” the result of UnitedHealth Group’s exit, the study, released Sunday, reveals.
Indeed, six years after ObamaCare was signed into law, America’s major medical insurers, concerned about their own bottom line, have started to pull the plug on a variety of services and options available to consumers. Citing major losses, the top five insurers – Humana, Anthem, Aetna, UnitedHealth Group, and Blue Cross Blue Shield – have threatened to pull out of the exchanges and have selectively started to do so in many counties.
In other words, by next year nearly a third of American counties will already be on virtual single-payer.