The fact that Trumpcare died such an ignoble and embarrassing death seems to have made some news types decide they have to look into the whole "Obamacare is in a death spiral" argument that Republicans keep making. Finally. The result? Hey, guess what—they're discovering Obamacare is not in a death spiral.
"It's a little like a patient with diabetes," Dr. Mario Molina, chief executive of Molina Health Care, a major insurer on the ACA exchanges, told NBC News. "It's relatively healthy at the moment, but if we don't take care of ourselves, we could be in trouble in the future." […]
Molina's company is considering whether to participate in various markets next year and where to set premiums, but the top concerns he described heading into that decision primarily involved "uncertainty" about the Trump White House's intentions, not the law itself. In particular, he's worried that the administration might halt subsidies to help low-income Americans with out-of-pocket costs that Republicans have challenged in court and that they might stop enforcing the individual mandate requiring people to purchase insurance.
"I don't think the marketplace is collapsing," he said. "I think we need to stop playing partisan politics and convene bipartisan groups to start negotiating the future of the health care system." […]
"In many states, it's going in the wrong direction with health plans pulling out," Billy Wynne, a health policy consultant at Thorn Run Partners, told NBC News. "The whole idea of the ACA is that these exchanges would succeed in bringing down premiums via competition, but you need participation to have that competition."
That having been said, Wynne predicted that the law's subsidies would induce insurers to enter markets where others pulled out, because the subsidies would rise to meet high premiums. Those types of monopolies could create more problems for the federal budget (although the ACA is spending less than originally projected so far), but as long as the law operates as planned, the hit to the average customer would be more muted.
"I don't think it's going to collapse absent intervention," Wynne said. "I think it could and likely would collapse with neglect or willful sabotage."
That sabotage is extremely likely, given that popular vote loser Donald Trump's Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price is an avowed Obamacare hater and Trump is unlikely to really care if he's trying to destroy the law. But this reporting by the traditional media is critical, and long overdue. Because the more the real story gets out, the clearer it will be who is responsible if Obamacare is killed off.