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Insurers unsure about sticking with Obamacare

Anyone who hasn’t had their heads stuck in the sand for the last seven years knows this so-called “affordable health care” scam has been anything but “affordable” for taxpayers.

This socialist government’s subsidized health care available to everybody, regardless of whether they can afford it or not, have seen prescription drugs skyrocketing, premiums for those wage earners unable to qualify for free coverage increase at record levels and even certain medical treatment no longer covered.

Obamacare, as most of us know it as, is on life support as soaring costs of providing free or subsidized health care is forcing insurance providers who bought into this Affordable Care Act’s insurance exchanges to pull the plug and bailing out totally.

Just recently, Aetna became just the latest health insure to cast doubt upon its future in these exchanges, and has called off a planned expansion suggesting it could abandon the market altogether.

The grim news is that a departure by Aetna, the nation’s third-largest insurer, could further reduce the number of choices for customers and eventually push insurance prices even higher.

It is a clear fact that several insurers are simply abandoning these exchanges because they are losing enormous amounts of money. One of the main reasons Aetna is calling it quits is that it has been swamped with higher than-expected costs, particularly from pricey specialty drugs.

UnitedHealth Group Inc. and Humana Inc. are also pulling back their involvement in exchanges, and several smaller, nonprofit insurance cooperatives are winding down business after losing millions of dollars.

This pie-in-the-sky pipe dream of Obama has become a major nightmare, including here in Arkansas where Gov. Asa Hutchinson is working hard to prevent a complete meltdown of the state’s own version of Obamacare, called Arkansas Works.

If all this isn’t bad enough news, we’re told a proposed 14.7 percent increase in premiums for Arkansas Blue Cross and Blue Shield health insurance plans now appears to be coming based on the cost of enrollees’ medical and drug expenses. So, what does that mean? Well, these particular plans cover more than 250,000 Arkansans, including about 130,000 participants in the so-called Arkansas Works, previously dubbed Arkansas works, the state’s expanded Medicaid program — a government hand-out or subsidy. Again, higher-thanexpected expenses, including those resulting from “high cost specialty drugs,” appear to be the “primary driver” of the insurer’s requested increase.

If approved, the increase, which would start Jan. 1, would affect the cost to the state’s taxpayers and the federal government to provide insurance for lowincome Arkansans through the private option.

It also would affect premiums paid by 71,000 consumers who are able to buy and are forced to take out coverage on their own rather than through employers.

As expected, the bureaucrats and politicians are crying foul and making it clear there is no substantive justification for the rate increases, but regardless of their ranting and complaining the taxpaying victims of this Obamacare scam are getting the shaft once again, and it appears there is nothing they can do to stop this health care disaster.

Bottom line is the so-called “poor” people get by with free health care, as usual, the wealthy don’t give a darn and the struggling middle class wind up paying more than their share and getting less.