The next round in the conservative assault on the Obamacare implementation was launched by the
Wall Street Journal Monday with an
op-ed from a gall bladder cancer patient in California, Edie Littlefield Sundby, whose insurance company is discontinuing not just her plan, but all individual policies in California. This means she'll have to make a choice, because all her physicians will not be included in the networks available.
So if I go with a health-exchange plan, I must choose between Stanford and UCSD. Stanford has kept me alive—but UCSD has provided emergency and local treatment support during wretched periods of this disease, and it is where my primary-care doctors are.
It's a very sad story, and frightening for Ms. Sundby. She shouldn't have to choose between providers to get the best care. But blaming this entirely on Obamacare is also a real stretch, because what's behind the decision by UnitedHealth, her previous carrier, is all about the fact that offering plans on the individual market was not profitable for United. Igor Volsky at ThinkProgress
has the story.
The company, which only had 8,000 individual policy holders in California out of the two million who participate in the market, announced (along with a second insurer, Aetna) that it would be pulling out of the individual market in May. The company could not compete with Anthem Blue Cross, Blue Shield of California and Kaiser Permanente, who control more than 80 percent of the individual market. “Over the years, it has become more difficult to administer these plans in a cost-effective way for our members,” UnitedHealth spokeswoman Cheryl Randolph explained. “We will continue to keep a major presence in California, focusing instead on large and small employers.” [...]
And then there is the company’s own justification for leaving. “The company’s plans reflect its concern that the first wave of newly insured customers under the law may be the costliest,” UHC Chief Executive Officer Stephen Helmsley told investors last October. “UnitedHealth will watch and see how the exchanges evolve and expects the first enrollees will have ‘a pent-up appetite’ for medical care. We are approaching them with some degree of caution because of that.”
Translation: people like Sudby are way too expensive, so we're backing out of the market while people like her sign up with other insurers, and then maybe we'll come back in after all the sick people have signed up and see if we can scoop up the healthy people. There's nothing in the law that prevents companies like UnitedHealth take decisions like this, so in that sense Obamacare is perhaps to blame. But that's a stretch, and since the company had so few customers in the individual market in California, chances are pretty damned good that these policies were going to be cancelled sooner or later anyway. But Obamacare makes a much better excuse for them than lack of profits.
It's horrible for individuals like Sudby. But the good news for her—and every other cancer survivor out there—is that she won't ever have a worse horror story. As long as Obamacare remains the law of the land, no insurance company will ever by able to refuse to insure her because she had cancer.
