It's been over two years since the bulk of Obamacare went into effect, and American health insurance companies are making a great case for why it's time to adopt a single payer system and take the profit motive out of how health care is paid for once and for all.
On Monday, Aetna, America's third largest insurance company,
announced that it will withdraw from Obamacare exchanges in 11 states and it will only offer insurance through the state-level Obamacare marketplaces in four states in 2017.
Obamacare has, overall, been a huge success, especially among the less visible and more marginalized populations in America.
Economist David Cutler told the
New York Times back in April that "The law has clearly reduced broad measures of inequality. These are people who blend into the background of the economy. They are cleaning your hotel room, making your sandwich. The law has helped this population enormously."
In February, the administration estimated that roughly 20 million more people have insurance now that Obamacare has gone into effect, and marginalized groups in general benefited the most.
According to that New York Times analysis from April: "Part-time workers gained insurance at a higher rate than full-time workers, and people with high school degrees gained it at double the rate of college graduates. Adults living in households headed by relatives, such as siblings or cousins, [which is] often a marker of economic distress, gained insurance at double the rate of traditional households."
And having health insurance and access to affordable healthcare leads to big benefits for communities: the New York Times reported that one federally funded health clinic in South Los Angeles has enrolled 18,000 new patients under the law, nearly all of them from minority backgrounds, and the clinic reported a 44 percent increase in cervical cancer screenings and a 25 percent increase in tobacco cessation therapy, which means more lives saved and healthier community outcomes.
But, Aetna's announcement on Monday is proof that the law is still fundamentally flawed.
And Aetna is by no means alone.
In April,
UnitedHealth Group, the largest health insurance company in America, announced in April that it will be withdrawing from the ACA insurance exchanges in most of the 34 states where it currently operates, saying that it's expecting to lose $650 million dollars in 2016.
The
Kaiser Family Foundation points out that if United dropped out of all 34 states, 1.1 million people would have just one option for an insurer, creating a for-profit monopoly for those people.
And then there's
Humana, which announced in July that the company will offer exchange plans in "no more" than 11 states next year in 2017.
Humana's announcement coincidentally came on the exact same day that the Department of Justice filed a lawsuit to block Humana's proposed merger with Aetna.
Some of the shortcomings with Obamacare can be traced to the fact that so many red states have refused federal funds to expand Medicaid.
But the truth is, we're never going to be able to affordably cover every American until we address the major problem with our health care system: The profit motive.
