Illustration by Christoph Niemann

Few companies are as unpopular as insurance companies, and no tears were shed for the insurance giant Aetna when, a couple of weeks ago, it announced that it had lost more than four hundred million dollars on Obamacare policies since the Obamacare exchanges were set up, in 2014, and was going to pull out of most of them. The news, which followed similar announcements by United Healthcare and Humana, was greeted with talk of “whining” insurers who “put profits before patients’ health” and are “willing to deny care to make a few extra dollars.” But the recriminations are misplaced. Aetna’s decision reflects an awkward reality: the jerry-rigged, politically compromised nature of Obamacare has made the program unstable, and unable to live up to its lofty promises.

It’s not that Obamacare has failed. As Larry Levitt, a health-care analyst at the Kaiser Family Foundation, told me, “The main goal of the law was to reduce the number of uninsured people, and twenty million more people are covered today because of it. It’s hard to call that a failure.” The reforms that Obamacare put in place have guaranteed access to insurance for people with preëxisting conditions, and have done away with caps on how much insurance companies will spend. Access to health care is less precarious than it used to be.

Still, we’re a long way from the future that Barack Obama envisaged when, in 2009, addressing the American Medical Association, he called for “comprehensive reform that covers everyone” and provides “affordable health insurance to every single American.” Some thirty million Americans remain uninsured. Participants in the A.C.A. marketplaces are less numerous, and sicker, than anticipated: 8.3 million fewer people enrolled through the exchanges this year than the Congressional Budget Office had projected. As a result, insurers in much of the country are fleeing the marketplaces. Kaiser estimates that between twenty and twenty-five per cent of U.S. counties may have only one insurer offering coverage in 2017; there’s already a county in Arizona with no Obamacare insurer at all. And the insurers that remain in these markets tend to offer an increasingly narrow network of health-care providers.

Lack of competition is a recipe for high premiums or low benefits (or both), further deterring younger, healthier people from buying policies. Which means that the risk pool gets still older and sicker, which means that more insurance companies lose money and leave the market, which means that competition is reduced even further, which means: see above. The U.S. could well end up with a two-tier insurance market, in which people lucky enough to get insurance through their employers will get much better coverage and wider options than those on the individual market, even when both groups are paying the same amount in premiums.

Obamacare is being hobbled by the political compromises made to get it passed. The program’s basic principles were the right ones: everyone would be able to get insurance, regardless of preëxisting conditions, and everyone would pay the same price for a given policy, with upward adjustments made only for older people and smokers. In short, insurance companies were prohibited from managing risk by charging healthy, low-risk people less than frailer, high-risk people. Since managing risk is typically key to how insurers make money, it would have made sense to leave them out and just enroll everyone in a government-run program like Medicare. Politics, of course, ruled that out. Shoring up the private-side approach would require penalties stiff enough to get young, healthy Americans to buy health insurance, but politics ruled that out as well.

Conservatives point to Obamacare’s marketplace woes as evidence that government should stop mucking around with health insurance. In fact, government hasn’t mucked around enough: if we want to make universal health insurance a reality, the government needs to do more, not less. That doesn’t require scrapping the current system: the Netherlands and Switzerland both demonstrate that you can get universal coverage through private insurers. But their examples also show that to do so we’d need to make it much harder to avoid buying insurance, and we’d need to expand subsidies to consumers.

Alternatively, we could implement the public option, which Obama himself called for in that 2009 speech: a federal program, modelled on Medicare, open to anyone on the individual market. The public option would guarantee that there was always at least one good choice available in the marketplace, and would provide competition for private insurers. If it used the government’s bargaining power to hold down costs and expand access, it could offer good benefits at a low enough price to attract younger, healthier patients.

There are solid arguments for both of these models. Either would work, if there were a shift in the political mood and it were given a shot. Even if nothing is done, Obamacare will continue to limp along, probably turning into something akin to Medicaid. But the departure of big insurers like Aetna has made it clear that, if we don’t do more to help cover people in the individual market, the program will never make good on its original promise of truly comprehensive reform. So don’t hate the players; fix the game. ♦