why the insurance industry needs obamacare to stay in business

[xchrom]

http://www.nationofchange.org/why-insurance-industry-needs-obamacare-stay-business-1333986118

If there is a group of people more anxious about how the Supreme Court will rule on the health care reform law than President Obama and the millions of Americans who are already benefiting from it, it is health insurance executives.

Not only have their companies been spending millions of dollars implementing the parts of the law that pertains to them — and most of them do — but they also have been counting on the law as very possibly the only thing that can preserve the free market system of health insurance in this country. This is why it is so ironic that defenders of the free market are the most vocal critics of the law and the ones hoping most ardently that the Court will declare it unconstitutional.

Health insurers have known for years that their business practices of excluding growing numbers of Americans from coverage and shifting more and more of the cost of care to policyholders are not sustainable over the long haul. That’s why their top priority during the health care reform debate was to make sure whatever bill Congress passed included the much-vilified individual mandate. And it’s also why the big insurance companies have been working almost frantically to reinvent themselves lately.

Cigna and Aetna recently became the latest of the biggest national firms to rebrand themselves and roll out new logos and self-descriptions. Cigna is now “a global health service company“ while Aetna is now “one of the nation's leading health care benefits companies.” What this means is that these companies and their competitors have come to understand that the very policies that enabled them to make Wall Street-pleasing profits over several years has led to a health insurance marketplace that is shrinking. And as it continues to shrink, so will their profit margins.

[marmar]

1. The mother of all bailouts?

nt

[xchrom]

3. looks like it to me...

[CAPHAVOC]

6. They are not insurance companies.

They are administrative services companies. Churning the numbers to skim free money off the top.

[Fumesucker]

2. Rmoneycare has reduced medical bankruptcy rate in Mass from 59.3% to 52.9%..

Clearly a major success story, let's hope that Obamacare can do as well.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21396505

In 2009, illness and medical bills contributed to 52.9% of Massachusetts bankruptcies, versus 59.3% of the bankruptcies in the state in 2007 (P=.44) and 62.1% nationally in 2007 (P<.02). Between 2007 and 2009, total bankruptcy filings in Massachusetts increased 51%, an increase that was somewhat less than the national norm. (The Massachusetts increase was lower than in 54 of the 93 other bankruptcy districts.) Overall, the total number of medical bankruptcies in Massachusetts increased by more than one third during that period. In 2009, 89% of debtors and all their dependents had health insurance at the time of filing, whereas one quarter of bankrupt families had experienced a recent lapse in coverage.

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4. indeed...wildly successful

[treestar]

5. Without Obamacare, insurance companies would go out of business?

Doubt it.