Health Tips

The individual health insurance market is becoming more unstable as last year's rate increases are beginning to take their toll on the health of the risk pools��particularly among the almost half of the consumers in the market that are not eligible for subsidies.

The Trump administration is making an already bad situation worse.

President Trump is wrong when he says the system will suddenly "

Amy Goldstein at the Washington Post is out with a story reporting that the Obama administration is looking to use an obscure federal law to pay billions of dollars in Obamacare risk corridor liabilities to participating insurance companies.

You might recall that the administration was only able to pay 12.5% of what insurers were owed for 2014 under the reinsurance program designed to protect

About half of those buying Obamacare compliant individual health plans do not receive a subsidy.

I was struck by this comment coming from one of Obamacare's most vocal supporters, Vox's Sarah Kliff:

Obamacare's insurance expansion is on the path to looking like other safety net programs we know, offering limited services to a predominantly low-income population.
She might be right about

How many people in the individual health insurance market don't get a subsidy to pay for their health insurance, or wouldn't be eligible for one it they did buy it?

Here is what an Obama administration spokesperson said yesterday about all of the big 2017 Obamacare rate increases: "Headline rate increases do not reflect what consumers actually pay," said Kathryn Martin, acting assistant

The denials about just how bad the Obmacare exchange situation is keep piling up.

Maybe the most uniformed and naive was this comment in the Dallas Morning News:

"The Blues have deep, deep reserves, and they'll be here long after we're gone,"[Sabrina] Collette [a research professor at Georgetown University], said. "They're probably calculating they can ride out this rocky time and emerge with a

In my last couple of posts, I have lamented the degree to which prominent Obamacare supporters have been denial about the trouble The Affordable Care Act exchanges are in. Now we can add the insurance industry trade association, AHIP, to the list.

With the Obamacare exchange exits by the publicly traded health plans, the not-for-profit Blue Cross and regional HMOs now form the backbone of the

My comments on CNBC today.

Affordable Care Act defenders need to understand that if we don't quickly move on to a robust conversation about how to fundamentally make the individual health insurance market viable many of the remaining often not-for-profit plans will have to walk away from the Obamacare exchanges.

See my post at Forbes

See my op-ed at CNBC

And my earlier post on the steps necessary to make Obamacare viable

North Carolina Family Plans Already Cost More Than $10,000 a Year With Rates Going Up By Double Digits for 2017

With
one state after another announcing big 2017 Obamacare rate increases
the latest refrain from Obamacare supporters is that with maybe one or
two more years of rate increases everything will be fine.

Talk about missing the forest for the trees.

The
latest example is in North

The Obama administration is out with a report that the average 2015 Obamacare exchange premium increased by only 8% last year.

As best I can tell, that is a true statement.

It is also an incredibly disingenuous statement.

There is an old actuarial saying about how numbers can be manipulated to suite the author's agenda: "Figures don't lie but liars figure." That the 2015 Obamacare exchange

Comments in a recent Politico article over United HealthCare's pullout from the Obamacare exchanges because of $1 billion in losses have me scratching my head.

"It's a nothingburger in terms of market impact, said insurance industry consultant John Gorman. But symbolically and politically, it's huge" He went on, "We're only about halfway through the drama of stabilizing these marketplaces.