Browse by Media Hit and Health Care

More reforms may need to be implemented in order to strengthen state health insurance marketplaces and keep payers participating in the exchanges.

Before the DOJ filed a lawsuit blocking the Aetna-Humana health insurance merger, the Aetna CEO sent a letter stating that, without the merger, it would drop out of the health insurance exchanges.

Insurers including Blue Cross, United Healthcare, Cigna, Humana — which last month said it will limit its participation to a handful of areas — have seen a gradual decline in stock prices, according to the Institute for Policy Innovation.

Aetna is planning to pull out of most of the public health insurance exchanges in 2017 and move from serving 778 counties to only 242 counties.

"About 7 million people are getting subsidies under the Affordable Care Act," said Merrill Matthews, Ph.D. "That certainly makes for a huge pool. But the structure of it is designed to fail.”

A number of health payers have been dropping out of the health insurance exchanges due to significant financial losses.

“What the Affordable Care Act was intended to do was to bring everyone into a relatively low deductible, low co-pay health insurance policy that was going to cover the vast majority of their expenses. What we have are very high-deductible policies that are forcing people to pay for an awful lot of care out of pocket that they used to pay for with health insurance,” Dr. Merrill Matthews said.

"Donald Trump has released his health care plan after being pressured into doing so," Dr.nMerrill Matthews noted in Forbes in March. "He should have taken a little more time. Though six of his seven points—they aren't developed enough to be called proposals—are standard Republican fare, they are too vague and superficial to determine what Trumpcare would be like."

"It’s a fair question as to how long health insurers can continue to provide the cost-sharing discounts unreimbursed," said IPI's Dr. Merrill Matthews. 

Merrill Matthews, a longtime HSA supporter, said the “qualified health plan” rules issued by the administration in early 2013 were “great news” and that HSA plans could end up being the favorite option in ObamaCare exchanges. Now it appears as though the administration has succeeded in quietly killing off HSAs, at least in the individual market.