“We have been witnessing the “ObamaCare Death Spiral” for some time now. Perhaps in the big public toilet of bad ideas, this is the flush:
The Affordable Care Act has reached a tipping point where the number of health care providers actually operating within the system have dropped beyond sustainability.
The latest casualty was Phoenix – America’s fifth-largest city. The county encompassing Phoenix – Maricopa County – recently lost any semblance of competition under ObamaCare.
When the program began, the county of 4 million had eight insurers competing for customers. Then they started to leave. On Friday, Phoenix Health Plans announced they were dropping out of the county, leaving Cigna the only game in town for more than 126,000 residents.
That leaves another part of the country with a health-care monopoly. The entire point of the ACA is competition under the so-called “exchange.” Without an exchange, insurers are free to raise the rates to whatever they want and consumers don’t have a choice. From The Guardian:
David Howard, an associate professor at Emory University’s department of health policy and management, said the ACA included provisions to keep the marketplaces stable, but some of those were watered down in the push to get the deal through Congress, and in other cases the provisions have not been enacted in the way people expected. “So that means the exchanges are potentially on the cusp of falling apart,” Howard said.
In addition to the lack of choice, fewer than half of Americans have signed up for ObamaCare than originally promised. Three years ago, Obama officials said we would have 20 million people covered by the program – the number is less than 12 million today ..” Read more ..
