U.S. President Donald Trump said on Friday that Obamacare was “exploding” after Republican lawmakers shelved legislation that would have dismantled the healthcare law.
That’s not going to happen this month. Probably not even this year.
The more than 12 million people who bought 2017 health insurance plans on HealthCare.gov and other websites the law created are not in danger of losing their healthcare or having their premiums go up right now, experts say.
But 2018 is another story.
Republicans could choose to pass a budget that defunds Obamacare’s cost-sharing subsidies, which help low-income people cover out-of-pocket and other medical costs. But that would be highly unpopular among consumers who would likely blame the president and Congress for skyrocketing healthcare costs, experts said.
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Obamacare, former Democratic President Barack Obama’s signature legislation created by the Affordable Care Act of 2010, has had a tough beginning. The mix of sick and healthy customers has been worse than expected, and premium rates on the individual insurance market went up 25 percent this year.
Other parts of the law, like the expansion of Medicaid to enhance coverage for the poor, and changes to allow young people to stay on their parents’ health plans, have been popular. And the defeat of the bill is a win for the hospitals that have benefited from those increased Medicaid dollars.
But many counties across the country have only one insurer, after Humana Inc, Aetna Inc and UnitedHealth Group Inc pulled out after reporting hundreds of millions of dollars of losses.
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The insurers who are left, Anthem Inc and other BlueCross BlueShield insurers across the country, as well as smaller players like Centene Corp and Molina Healthcare Inc need to decide in the next few months where to sell insurance and how much to charge.
And that is where the market’s slow burn takes off, with insurers leaving and premiums rising.
Jeff Jonas, a portfolio manager at Gabelli Funds who focuses on health care, said that for consumers, 2018 looks uncertain, with a “death spiral” of decreasing competition and increasing premium rates ramping up.
