Still Report #1140 – Tennessee’s Obamacare Exchange Near Collapse




from Bill Still

Good evening, I’m still reporting on medical insurance.
Even for someone who has not followed the Obamacare mess closely, it is now becoming apparent that just as feared, the entire experiment will probably collapse in a huge cloud of national debt in Donald Trump’s first year in office.
According to Tennessee’s Insurance regulator, the state’s Obamacare exchange is “very near collapse.”
According to the Nashville Tennessean, Commissioner Julie Mix McPeak said she felt she had to approve a very unusual second rate request for 2017 by the few remaining insurers or they might leave the exchange all together.
Blue Cross BlueShield of Tennessee has already been approved for a 62% rate increase in 2017 over the current year.
Cigna revised their request upwards to a 46% rate increase.
Humana raised theirs to a 44.3% increase.
A spokeswoman for Cigna in Nashville, Katie Sulkowski, explained that people who are buying plans on the exchange are using more medical services than predicted. In other words, they are sicker.
When Obamacare opened health-insurance exchanges in 2014, the administration predicted that the marketplaces would quickly thrive. That was just another politically-induced lie.
The truth is that entire system nationwide is in dire straits. So far this year, enrollment is less than half that projected by the Congressional Budget Office. Sixteen of the 23 non-profit, state-chartered co-ops created by Obamacare have gone bankrupt. Major insurers are quitting, premiums are skyrocketing and the administration is taking increasingly desperate measures to hide the problems.
It won’t work long-term. They are just trying to get across the Jan. 20th finish line, dump the problems on Trump, then get out of town ahead of the pitchforks.
I’m still reporting from Washington. Good day.