Obamacare continued to bleed this week as insurance giant Aetna announced it will drop out of 11 of the 15 states where it currently offers plans on the Affordable Care Act exchanges.
This came just weeks after Humana said it would pull out of the exchanges in four states and UnitedHealth announced it plans to remain on no more than three state exchanges.
What goes around comes around, noted Lee Hieb, M.D., past president of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons.
"Insurance companies like Aetna lobbied for Obamacare because they saw it as a moneymaking deal," Hieb told WND. "Now they’re being hoist by their own petard, and they deserve it."
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Hieb, author of "Surviving the Medical Meltdown: Your Guide to Living Through the Disaster of Obamacare," said she does not know what the insurers were thinking when they supported Obamacare.
She pointed out insurance companies make money by insuring people who don't often get sick, such as children and young adults. But, according to Hieb, when an adult enrolls in a family plan through Obamacare, he or she often excludes the children, because children can more easily qualify for Medicaid than their parents.
If they qualify for Medicaid, they can't be part of the family plan.
"So the state takes the upside of the non-sick people, and the exchange takes the people that are actually going to use the services," Hieb explained.
She said that was the reason Blue Cross Blue Shield didn't take part in the exchanges in her home state of Iowa: They didn't want to give up so many of their low-risk, high-paying patients. They realized Obamacare would be a serious problem for their profits.
In Hieb's view, people who thought Obamacare was a good idea fall into multiple categories: economic illiterates, those who don't understand American liberty, those who believe in a nanny state and greedy people who thought Obamacare would put government money in their pockets. Hieb suspects most insurers fall into the latter category.
"I just think they thought they were smarter than the government guys and they thought they were going to make money on this, and surprise, surprise," Hieb chided.
Insurers have lost money on their Obamacare plans largely because the risk pools are tilted toward sicker people who are likely to use more services. The insurance companies could fix their financial problems if more healthy people signed up on the exchanges, but Hieb said that will never happen at the current prices. The doctor said that before Obamacare she paid $65 a month for her children's health insurance, but now she pays $200 a month.
She said if a person is young and healthy, buying into a big group policy is more expensive than buying an individual plan. What's more, the Obamacare exchanges don't incentivize young, healthy people to buy in because they can simply wait until they are sick to buy coverage, and insurers are not allowed to deny them coverage at that point.
"That's like the guy being able to buy house insurance when his house is on fire," Hieb explained. "No insurance company could survive that, but that's the big rule that's caused Obamacare to sink: You can't deny insurance coverage to people regardless of what their illness status is.
"Well, unfortunately, that doesn't incentivize people to take care of themselves, number one. Number two, it's an economically unsustainable, and that's not insurance. Insurance is a gambling game."
The important thing to remember, according to Hieb, is that Obamacare is not about helping the insurance companies, making things easy for consumers or providing Americans with more health care choices.
She referenced Obamacare architect Zeke Emanuel's declaration in 2014 that health care choice is "overrated."
"They don't really care about profit," Hieb said of the Obamacare creators. "They're not in it to actually give you great medical care. They want government control of you. They just want to control the system. They want to control all medical care, so quality only gets certain lip service."