[Obamacare] Blue Cross to pull PPO Product from marketplace

I will be curious to see what the fall out will be in 5-10 years from now.

 

Is that only happening in Texas? If so, why is that?

 

Let's get a god damned single-payer system already...

 

We are going single-payer eventually.

 

Why would they not just raise their prices to market-clearing rates? It's not like they requested one of those 100% type rate hikes - they requested 20%. They have 400k customers - why throw that all away? Just raise rates and/or make the network a bit smaller - if you end up with fewer customers, they are likely to be the wealthier (and thus healthier) of the bunch, so their risk pool improves. They already have all the infrastructure (claims processing, etc) in place and that all will remain for other plans anyway, so it's not like they wouldn't be able to function with 300k customers.

 

Also, is there a link to a news story about this, or is this inside-info? I can't seem to find it mentioned anywhere.

 

Texas is a broken insurance marketplace as a whole. The exchange wasn't going to fix that.

Rates are going up here where I live but its nothing like Texas. Even with the final rate increases, Minnesota most likely will end up with the lowest premiums in the US for the third year in a row.

The general population here is far healthier and the government has a lot more support for low income families that pushes them into expanded Medicaid and a separate state run program called MinnesotaCare that targets families above the Medicaid threshold. So the insurance pool here tends to be much more sustainable than Texas which basically pushed the burden of coverage solely on insurance companies.

Bottom line, how your government chooses to approach health care makes a gigantic difference. Texas as a whole is a disaster. I can't say I'm shocked that the marketplace is struggling as a result. You have a government that will do everything it can to sabotage the health care law and a population that is below average in terms of health and health outcomes.

 

How was Texas doing before Obama care? I guess the solution is just to keep 20-30% of the population off health insurance.

 

Forgive us, if we don't share your pessimism, until we have a chance to actually read the story.

 

Oh for sure. The flaw of the ACA will always be the fact that the administration focused on universal coverage and punted on cost control. I think that was the real fatal flaw of the law. The administration simply split all of the new revenue gained from newly insured Americans with the hospitals/pharma/insurance companies in the form of cuts to Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements. None of that was big enough to truly bend the cost curve.

And blame goes to everyone. Obviously the hospitals and pharma had interests to protect. The insurance companies were threatened by separate elements of the law. Even unions torpedoed a lot of the changes to the tax deduction for health care premiums. We ended up with a law that gave coverage to everyone (which is great) but did next to nothing to control costs.

I think the law is still better than nothing but no one should pretend that this is even close to a final product. It has holes everywhere that need to be addressed. Unfortunately, it'll take one party control (either Republicans or Democrats) to actually do anything. And the Republicans are so far in the deep end at the moment that I'm not sure they can stop to take a minute to think rationally about this.

 

Texas was and still is the worst in the country. It shouldn't shock anyone that an insurance exchange is struggling in Texas. The state has fundamental problems beyond insurance markets that impact health. Your wonderful agriculture commissioner is campaigning on reintroducing deep fried food into schools for god's sake. The Texas government doesn't give a damn about health outcomes. And in an environment like that, how could you expect an insurance company to not lose money on exchange plans?