Last week, UnitedHealth, one of the biggest insurers in the United States, announced that it would cease a good amount of healthcare marketing in 2016 as it ponders whether or not to stay in the exchanges for 2017 and beyond. Now, the CEO has come out and stated that UnitedHealth should have waited longer before joining Obamacare.
From Bloomberg:
UnitedHealth Group Inc. should have stayed out of Obamacare’s new individual markets longer, the chief executive officer of the biggest U.S. health insurer said Tuesday, after announcing last month that it will take hundreds of millions of dollars in losses related to the business.
While the company’s other lines of business are growing, instead of expanding into Obamacare next year, the company should have kept waiting, UnitedHealth CEO Stephen Hemsley said at an investor meeting in New York.
“It was for us a bad decision,” Hemsley said. “I take accountability for sitting out the exchange market in year one so we could in theory observe, learn and see how the market experience would develop. This was a prudent going-in position. In retrospect, we should have stayed out longer.”
UnitedHealth said on Nov. 19 that it may quit selling coverage in the Affordable Care Act’s individual markets in 2017. The markets are a key element of the law’s goal to cover about 10 million Americans next year, and UnitedHealth had expanded its offerings for 2016, after initially holding off when the markets started covering people in 2014.
Losses from the plans this year and next will total more than half a billion dollars, the company has said, and UnitedHealth will scale back efforts to market coverage to millions of people shopping for 2016 insurance on the Affordable Care Act’s new marketplaces.
UnitedHealth is not alone in its Obamacare struggles. Other insurers, including competitors Anthem Inc. and Aetna Inc., have also either suffered losses in the markets or said they haven’t seen the margins they expected. Next year will be the law’s third of providing coverage.
“It will take more than a season or two for this market to develop,” Hemsley said. “We did not believe it would form this slowly, be this porous, or become this severe.”
Hemsley said today that the rest of UnitedHealth’s businesses are faring better than its comparatively small exchange operation, which it has said covers about 540,000 people. The company said it expects operating earnings of $13.1 billion to $13.5 billion next year, on revenue of $180 billion to $181 billion.
UnitedHealth advanced 1.7 percent to $114.59 at 10:01 a.m. in New York. The stock has gained 11 percent this year, as of Monday’s close.
Enrollment at the company’s insurance businesses will climb to 47.4 million to 48.2 million people next year, from 46.2 million at the end of 2015. The company is projecting more enrollees in line of business including Medicare Advantage and Medicaid. Separately, UnitedHealth said its drug-coverage business for the elderly, Medicare Part D, may lose as many as 650,000 customers.
Across all of its insurance businesses, UnitedHealth said it expects to spend about 81.5 cents of every dollar it takes in from premiums on medical expenses.
I have no remorse for insurance companies like United Health. Their decision to get on board with this pyramid scheme was purely political. The GAO laid out what needed to happen to make this pie in the sky boondoggle successful. Any person with a brain knew that the young being healthy and feeling invincible was not going to sign up in the numbers necessary to subsidize the older and infirm part of our population. That is just old fashioned common sense which is in very short supply these days. With the huge losses that United Health is projecting, the honorable thing for Helmsley to do is resign. We are talking about the private sector not the government so if he doesn’t resign he should be removed by the Board and stockholders. Maybe this would be a wake up call for future company decisions to safeguard and protect company assets and not be influenced by political ramifications.
You make an interesting point about resignation. Who knows what load was fed to the insurance companies as well.
Obamacare is definitely a failure — what happens to it, or what replaces it, will be very interesting indeed.