When Hillary Clinton decided to run as the third term of Obama she probably didn't anticipate that she would be having to deal with a crisis in Obama's signature piece of legislation.



Aetna the nation's fourth-largest health insurer, just decided to stop offering plans on Obamacare's exchanges in all but four states in 2017....

Aetna isn't the only insurer giving up on Obamacare. UnitedHealth, America's biggest insurer, will sell plans in just three states next year, down from 34 this year. Humana will offer coverage in just 156 counties in 2017, 88 percent fewer than this year.

In other words, the insurance "death spiral" has arrived. Obamacare's critics have long predicted that exchange plans' high premiums and deductibles would keep all but the sickest Americans from enrolling. These people would need so much medical care that insurers would lose money no matter how much they raised premiums. Eventually, insurers would have no choice but to pull out.

I don't recall that being the reason to oppose Obamacare in 2009. I remember bullsh*t arguments about socialism.

Nevertheless, that appears to be what is happening.



If three of the nation's largest insurers can't make it on the Obamacare exchanges, can anyone?

That's the question hanging over President Obama's signature health reform law less than three months before enrollment begins for 2017....

There's no question many insurers are losing big money on Obamacare. Costs exceeded income by 5% in 2014, and that figure doubled the following year, according to McKinsey's Center for U.S. Health System Reform. Losses are expected to grow this year.

Around one in seven Obamacare customers is about to lose their insurance plan.



"It's especially disturbing that this move could negatively impact nearly 10,000 citizens enrolled in Obamacare in Pinal County, Ariz., where not a single health insurer has filed to offer federal exchange plans," he said.

The premiums and deductibles are so high in Obamacare that healthy, young people are doing the math and realizing that a modest tax hit makes a lot more sense than paying for something they can't afford to use.

This decision is going to become even more extreme in 2017.



Insurers are seeking approval for average national premium increases of 24%, according to calculations by Charles Gaba of ACAsignups.net.

Some will point out that what is requested and what the government approves are two different things.

However, so far the approved rate hikes are averaging 17%, and less than two percent lower than what was requested in each case.

There is no way in this universe that Congress will approve a massive tax penalty this year in order to save Obamacare. So expect more healthy, young people to drop out.

People over at TOP will probably deny that Obamacare is so poorly designed that insurers are losing money, but the actual markets say otherwise.



Generally speaking, a company’s abdication of a revenue-bearing market would usually be met with jeers, and a stock’s plunge. AET shares haven’t budged, though. Shareholders are more than well aware the Obamacare market isn’t a good business to be in.

All but seven of the twenty-three Obamacare co-ops have gone under.

There is one other Obamacare number that you won't read about on TOP as well - it's a job killer.



Many companies are cutting jobs in response to rising health care costs spurred by the Affordable Care Act, according to a new survey by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Roughly one-fifth of service sector and manufacturing company executives said they are reducing the number of workers in response to provisions in the healthcare law, according to the Empire State Manufacturing Survey and the Business Leaders Survey.

The dramatic hike in 2017 premiums are going to make this even worse.

Can we have single payer now?