The future of Obamacare now looks like more money for less generous coverage than its architects had hoped in the first few years

See Obamacare Insurers Are Suffering. That Won't End Well. by Megan McArdle. Excerpts:

"UnitedHealth abruptly said it expected to lose hundreds of millions of dollars on its exchange policies in 2015 and 2016, and would be assessing whether to pull out of the market altogether in the first half of next year."

"Stories included not just UnitedHealth’s dire warnings, but also updates in the ongoing saga of higher premiums, higher deductibles and smaller provider networks that have been coming out since open enrollment began.

It now looks pretty clear that insurers are having a very bad experience in these markets. The sizeable premium increases would have been even higher if insurers had not stepped up the deductibles and clamped down on provider networks. The future of Obamacare now looks like more money for less generous coverage than its architects had hoped in the first few years.

But of course, that doesn’t mean insurers need to leave the market. Insurance is priced based on expectations; if you expect to pay out more, you just raise the price. After all, people are required to buy the stuff, on pain of a hefty penalty. How hard can it be to make money in this market?

What UnitedHealth’s action suggests is that the company is not sure it can make money in this market at any price. Executives seem to be worried about our old enemy, the adverse selection death spiral, where prices go up and healthier customers drop out, which pushes insurers' costs and customers' prices up further, until all you’ve got is a handful of very sick people and a huge number of very expensive claims."

"Most of the people buying exchange policies are subsidized, so to them, it doesn’t much matter whether their premiums go up, because the price of the cheaper plans is capped as a percentage of their income."

"To be sure, over the long term, that could change, because the subsidy calculation has a weird time bomb in it. Right now, subsidies are calculated so as to make the second-cheapest Silver plan on the exchange cost a fixed percentage of your income, or less. That percentage is calculated on a sliding scale -- low for people near the federal poverty line, and rising to around 10 percent for folks making closer to four times the baseline. (People who make more than that aren’t eligible for subsidies.) But the moment that subsidies start costing the government more than 0.504% of GDP, which would currently be about $85 billion, the expenditure is supposed to be capped, which would mean that subsidies would have to be decreased or withdrawn for some folks.

So concerns about the death spiral never quite went away. But they did recede, because, thanks to lower-than-expected enrollment, subsidy expenditures are supposed to come well below $30 billion this year. It’s unlikely that we’ll hit the trigger until 2019 or later, if indeed we ever do.

But on the conference call, Stephen Helmsley, the CEO of UnitedHealth, expressed concerns that the exchanges were seeing adverse selection anyway. Not just that the Obamacare insurance pool is sicker and more expensive than expected, which we already knew. But that the pool is experiencing adverse selection over the course of the year, as healthy people stop paying their premiums, and sicker people buy in. According to Helmsley, the people who bought insurance from them through the exchange, but outside of the open enrollment period, are averaging about 20 percent more expensive than the rest of the pool."

"possibility that only two years in, people have figured out how to game the special enrollment process so that it’s safe for them to go without insurance, and then sign up for coverage if they get sick."

"UnitedHealth really is losing money on these policies right now. It really is seeing something that looks dangerously like adverse selection."