United Healthcare is abandoning ObamaCare (for the most part), and it’s is probably the leading edge of a mass exodus from Obamacare markets by other insurers. This will be a classic death spiral: as each insurer leaves the markets, it will ratchet the burden (losses) on those still there, and there’s more incentive for others to leave.
The problem for ObamaCare is that United Healthcare and others are doing exactly what so many predicted they would: acting rationally. Why would they stick around and continue to lose money?
Some including the Wall Street Journal seem to say that the Obamacare central planners must be scratching their heads and panicking. But are they?
It is almost certain that ObamaCare will implode. But what then? Let’s face it: no matter how bad ObamaCare is, progressives won’t look to a market-based solution that rolls back a massive bureaucracy? To them, the answer to big problems caused by big government is always more regulation, more big government. And the next step to progressives, once ObamaCare fails, will be to demonize insurers like UHC, then complain that ObamaCare didn’t go far enough. And then it’s on to truly socialist medicine: “single-payer.” Insurers are evil, progressives will say; the only way to fix healthcare is to allow the government to take it over.
Single payer healthcare has been the left’s goal for a very long time, and some might – might – say they were willing to support Obamacare, with all of its flaws, because it was a politically saleable first step to “universal,” government-run healthcare.
Don’t believe me? Just wait…