Obamacare's big winners: Insurers. Oops! http://buzz.money.cnn.com/2013/11/21/obamacare-insurers-stocks/?iid=HP_LN The president is not going to like reading this. But I've got some more troubling news to share about Obamacare. It's bad enough that the HealthCare.gov site makes Ticketmaster.com look like an exemplar of reliability. But it is also becoming increasingly obvious that the giant health insurance companies are the biggest winners of the Affordable Care Act ... and not the consumers who need insurance. (more at above url)
No one knows if the insurers will be the so called winners down the road as they will have to compete in the exchanges. In some states there are insurance oligopolies - see Roginsky: The Health Insurance Oligopoly (A major cause of these burdensome premium hikes is the tremendous monopolies enjoyed by insurance companies across the country. Two large insurance companies cornered 98% of the market in Hawaii 2007. In California, the most competitive of the states surveyed, two insurance companies controlled 44% of the market. All across the United States, these insurers have no incentive to negotiate lower premiums because, like any monopoly, they know they are the only game in town.) Who the hell in their right mind would give up an oligopoly to compete in an exchange? Come on anti-Obamacare people, you can come up with better articles / arguements than that.
You could be shown 1000 different irrefutable facts showing Obamacare is a train wreck, yet still you and the other Obama lovers would fall on a sword if Master O told you to.
Many states including North Carolina only have one insurance company in the exchange that provides state-wide coverage. There is effectively NO competition in the exchanges in over 50% of the states. Obamacare is nothing more than a give-away to insurance companies who are able to greatly hike their rates knowing many individuals will get subsidies out of our tax dollars to offset the hikes. If the country believes that universal healthcare is a worthwhile objective (and people can debate this) then Obamacare is probably the worse possible implementation possible. There are plenty of western nations with excellent universal healthcare models that involve a base public plan that the private insurance companies must compete against to keep costs low. The majority of the people in these nations have low cost private insurance. There is also the insanity of not allowing insurance companies to compete at a national level but being restricted to state-lines - forcing the need for 'state exchanges' rather than a single national pool of private insurance options (like all the countries with successful healthcare models have).
Insurers Could Get Multi-Millions in Obamacare Bailout The insurance industry may be next in line to receive a hefty government bailout. Thatâs what could happen if signups for Obamacare fall short of expectations triggering an obscure provision in the Affordable Care Act that makes up any serious losses. The potential price tag: millions of taxpayer dollars or more over a 3-year period. So-called ârisk corridorsâ were included in the 2010 health law to compensate insurance companies for major coverage losses in the event that far more older and sick people signed up for health plans than younger, healthy people and drove up their costs after they had set the premiums. If actual claims exceed projections by more than 3 percent under Obamacare, the government will compensate the industry for those losses. http://finance.yahoo.com/news/insurers-could-multi-millions-obamacare-111500000.html
Higher prices are inevitable. Obamacare was written largely by industry lobbyists who designed it specifically to drive up prices and profits. Obamacare dramatically increases the demand for healthcare without increasing the supply (or otherwise controlling costs). The result will be large increases in healthcare costs and insurance premiums. Below is a link to an excellent PBS special presentation that shows how Congress allowed the healthcare industry to write most of Obamacare. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/obamasdeal/view/