Going, going, gone.
For now, of course, since once the Employer Mandate kicks in a year from now (unless Barack Obama illegally moves it up or pushes it back again), UHC will be thrown right back in the proverbial deep end of the pool.
But for now, let the ObamaCare death spiral
UnitedHealth Group Inc., the largest U.S. health insurer, said it may pull out of the ObamaCare insurance [cartel] and cut its earnings estimate for the year.
The stock slumped in early trading.
“The company is evaluating the viability of the insurance [cartel] product segment and will determine during the first half of 2016 to what extent it can continue to serve the public [cartel]s in 2017,” UnitedHealth said in a statement.
Translation: UHC is losing money by the truckload on O-Care policies and is looking to cut its losses, just like the smaller competitors that preceded them out the individual market door:
Insurers have struggled to profit from the government-run [cartel] created by ObamaCare. Anthem Inc. last month said some rivals were offering premiums too low to provide the coverage patients require and book a profit.
“We can expect other participants to guide to the same experience,” Sheryl Skolnick, an analyst at Mizuho Securities, said in a note.
Just like the cascade failure of the twenty-three ObamaCare coops (the substitute for the "public option") around the country. Forcibly making health insurance more "affordable" to patients doesn't make providing it more "affordable" to insurers, doctors, and hospitals, which is why the feds subsidized all three the past few years. Now those bailouts have expired, and providers are either folding their hands, pushing away from the metaphorical table, and calling it a permanent day or they're losing everything. Either way, it means contraction of supply of medical services, which means more upward pressure on prices, which means likely price controls holding premiums below where the market would rationally set them, which means demand outstripping supply even more, which means even bigger medical service and supply shortages....in other words, the death spiral.
And, of course, ObamaCare didn't make health insurance more affordable, it made it exorbitantly more expensive.
Describing socialist anything, including medicine, as a "failure" is like trying to extract a tooth with a pair of spaghetti pliers. No rational person would ever presume that spaghetti pliers could accomplish that task, so if a dentist suggested it, you would naturally conclude that he didn't want to remove that tooth. But spaghetti is SO delicious that the laity just can't bring themselves to dismiss the idea, and so they WANT to believe that spaghetti pliers might still possibly become an implement of dentistry. And if you point out that that is impossible, well, you're an evil spaghettiphobe, and probably anti-Italian as well. In the mean time, all that spaghetti has eaten holes through several more of your teeth. But that's all the spaghettiphobes' fault.
See how much time UHC employees have had freed up for such insightful analyses? Or perhaps finding better things to do?
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