The Obama administration claims that its Obamacare sign-up numbers aren’t that far off from where they need to be. They have a vested interest in selling the program as a success, and have proven themselves dishonest about it from the beginning. Obama knew that his “if you like your healthcare, you can keep your healthcare” promise was bogus the entire time.
The CEO of Aetna insurance, Mark Bertolini, has a different take on the president’s signature healthcare law.
Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini told CNBC on Wednesday that Obamacare has failed to attract the uninsured, and he offered a scenario in which the insurance company could be forced to pull out of program.
The company will be submitting Obamacare rates for 2015 on May 15.
“Are they going to be double-digit [increases] or are we going to get beat up because they’re double-digit or are we just going to have to pull out of the program?” Bertolini asked in a “Squawk Box” interview from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “Those questions can’t be answered until we see the population we have today. And we really don’t have a good view on that.”
He said that so far, Obamacare has just shifted people who were insured in the individual market to the public exchanges where they could get a better deal on a subsidy for coverage. “We see only 11 percent of the population is actually people that were firmly uninsured that are now insured. So [it] didn’t really eat into the uninsured population.”
Obamacare has actually added to the number of uninsured, with Target being the latest company to announce that it was ending healthcare for its part-time workers. They will be dumped onto the exchanges, and some will be subsidized by the government, meaning the cost to taxpayers will increase.
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