OBAMACARE DEATH SPIRAL! Premiums Likely to Rise 40-60% as More Insurers Pull OUT!

Just as Donald Trump often says “Obamacare is a DISASTER.”

As another major health insurance company exits the vast majority of Obamacare exchanges and many U.S. states are forecasting massive premium increases later this year, a leading health care expert says the Obamacare death spiral is already beginning.

Late Monday, Aetna announced it was pulling out of Obamacare exchanges in all but four U.S. states as a result of large financial losses. The company reported $200 million in pre-tax losses in the second quarter of 2016 alone.

“As a strong supporter of public exchanges as a means to meet the needs of the uninsured, we regret having to make this decision,” said Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini in a written statement.

Galen Institute President Grace-Marie Turner told WND and Radio America Aetna’s decision to largely abandon the exchanges is a huge development.

“Aetna was all-in in not only trying to get the law passed but also to try to make this work,” she said. “So with Aetna throwing in the towel, I think it really shows the way this law is structured, and particularly the way it’s been implemented, just does not work.”

Turner said Aetna is hardly an outlier. She said health insurers are getting crushed with financial losses from the health-care law.

“[Aetna] estimates they’ve lost $400 million through their exchange business,” Turner said. “United Healthcare reported a week or two ago that they had lost $300 million. The estimates are that altogether insurance companies lost $4 billion in both 2014 and 2015.”

She said numbers like that leave insurance executives no choice but to get out.

“They are very likely losing the same amount in 2016,” Turner said. “They are basically saying we can no longer justify to our shareholders participation in these failing exchanges.”

The Aetna announcement also convinces Turner that America has now begun the Obamacare “death spiral.”

“That really is an indication we are in the death spiral,” she said. “That means you wind up with fewer and fewer healthy people in the pools and more and more sick people. When that happens, the premiums have to go up and up and up. We’re seeing that already in the requests for premium increases next year – in some cases 40, 50 or 60 percent increases.”

As distressing as this is, Turner said the frustration is far deeper when realizing she and other Obamacare opponents predicted this exact scenario.

“In our book, ‘Why Obamacare is Wrong for America,’ we said this is what was going to happen because we could see that the law itself and particularly the regulations that have been developed since then were designed to destabilize the functional mechanisms of insurance markets. That’s exactly what’s happening now,” Turner said.

H/T – WND

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