Only one option in many counties.

Arise Health Plan, a subsidiary of WPS Health Solutions, said Thursday that it will not sell health plans on the marketplaces set up through the Affordable Care Act next year, becoming the latest company to abandon the market.

Arise and WPS Health Insurance also will sell only high-deductible health plans for individuals and their families off the marketplace, and those plans will be available only in a limited number of counties.

The two health insurers will renew so-called transitional plans – health plans sold before 2014 that don’t comply with the regulations imposed by the Affordable Care Act – through next year.

For now, the marketplace for Milwaukee County next year will have four companies offering health plans: Molina Healthcare; Network Health Plan, owned by Ascension Wisconsin and Froedtert Health; Common Ground Healthcare Cooperative; and Children’s Community Health Plan.

Waukesha County tentatively will have those companies as well as Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield in Wisconsin and Dean Health Plan.

The two counties – and others in Wisconsin – are in a better position than many throughout the country. Roughly a third of the counties are expected to have only one company offering health plans on their marketplaces as insurers have pulled out after incurring large losses.

Odds are that 75% or more of these students support Obamacare. The odds are also that fewer than 10% of those will make the connection between their politics and their livelihood.

“With less hours, many students will have to juggle two jobs, and that will definitely hurt academic success,” undergraduate student worker Reid Kurkerewicz said in comments provided by the Student Labor Action Coalition (SLAC).

“UW-Madison student workers would love to work less hours so they can put their academics first, but Chancellor Blank refuses to pay a living wage, making that impossible for many working class students,” said Jia Gonitzke, an undergraduate student worker.

I thought we created this monstrosity to make healthcare insurance more affordable? From MacIver:

Of the 87 Obamacare-compliant health insurance plans that reported rate changes to healthcare.gov, the average increase was 10 percent. Seventy-four plans requested increases, while 13 requested modest decreases.

The proposed 2017 double-digit price increases come on top of an 8.67 percent premium increase last year and a 17 percent increase in the cost of the deductible for silver plans.

“These products include plans which are compliant with all ACA requirements for inclusions on state and federal healthcare insurance exchanges. These plans have effective dates on or after January 1, 2014,” the website states. The 10 percent average is for plans whose rate changes would take effect on or after January 1, 2017.

The highest requested increase is a whopping 45.6 percent increase from Aetna for its small group indemnity plan. Aetna also requested a 38.8 percent rate hike for its preferred provider organization (PPO) plan.

Of the 87 plans, 15 requested an increase of 20 percent or more.Twenty plans requested an increase of between 10 and 19 percent. That means 35 plans, or 40 percent of all that requested a rate change, requested more than the 10 percent average.

Ouch.

UnitedHealthcare, the biggest health insurer in the United States, said Tuesday that it plans to exit most of the Affordable Care Act state exchanges where it currently operates by 2017.

The health insurer had already indicated that it was dropping coverage of the plans, more commonly known as Obamacare, in Arkansas, Georgia and Michigan.

But during a conference call with analysts Tuesday, CEO Stephen Hemsley noted that “next year we will remain in only a handful of states.”

Hemsley explained that UnitedHealth will leave most states by 2017 because the markets for these exchanges are relatively small and also have higher risks for the company over the short-term.

Once again, this was easily predicted before Obamacare was ever rammed down our throats.

Consumers who signed up for Blue Cross Blue Shield health plans through the Affordable Care Act’s insurance marketplaces these last two years tended to be sicker and incurred greater medical costs than people with BCBS coverage through their jobs.

The enrollees in those individual health plans in 2014 and 2015 had higher rates of diabetes, depression and heart disease, according to a report released Wednesday by the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association.

Medical costs for individuals who obtained coverage through the ACA’s insurance exchanges were, on average, 22 percent higher than those with employer-based coverage in 2015, according to the association. Average monthly medical spending per member was $559 for individual enrollees in 2015, for example, versus $457 for group members.

I know… shocking.

Yesterday, in its budget and economic outlook for the next decade, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) substantially changed its short-term Affordable Care Act (ACA) estimates in ways that show the law is performing far worse than expected. CBO’s new projection of 13 million exchange enrollees in 2016 is nearly 40% below previous expectations. CBO’s also projects that the average subsidy per enrollee in 2016 will increase by about 18% relative to its March 2015 ACA estimate—an indication that enrollees are both less healthy and poorer than the agency originally projected.

Additionally, the ACA’s Medicaid expansion is costing far more than projected because of higher enrollment and higher spending per enrollee. The costs of Medicaid expansion almost certainly exceed corresponding benefits given the findings of a recent study by MIT, Harvard, and Dartmouth economists that Medicaid expansion enrollees only receive about 20 to 40 cents of benefit for each dollar of program spending. Overall, CBO’s revision demonstrates that the ACA’s coverage expansion is primarily benefiting people earning less than 200% of the federal poverty level (FPL)—an income equal to $23,540 for a single person—while its costs, largely in the form of higher premiums and taxes and fewer health insurance choices, are widespread.

It’s almost like someone could have predicted this.

UnitedHealth (UNH), which is weighing an exit from the Obamacare exchanges, reported it lost about $475 million on Obamacare-compliant plans in 2015 and expects to lose more than $500 million this year.

The insurer, the parent company of United Healthcare, ended last year with about 500,000 enrollees in Obamacare exchange plans. It expects that number to grow towards 800,000 during the 2016 open enrollment period, which ends Jan. 31, before dropping again as some members get jobs, stop paying premiums or find insurance elsewhere. (Also in 2015, it had about 150,000 enrollees who signed up outside the exchanges for individual policies that are compliant with Obamacare.)

UnitedHealth, which sat out the first year of Obamacare in 2014, said it is not looking to grow its exchange business. Instead, it has increased prices, eliminated marketing and commissions and withdrawn its top-tier products. In an effort to stem the losses, it is also working more closely with providers and enrollees to manage their illnesses and care.

It’s almost as if someone could have predicted this…

Robert Laszewski of Health Policy and Strategy Associates has contended that the health plans “are just plain unattractive” because of their high premiums, deductibles and copays for people who don’t receive the additional subsidies.

“The value simply isn’t there for the working and middle class — unless of course you are sick,” Laszewski, a Wausau native, recently wrote in a column for Forbes magazine.

The cost still is high even if you are sick. The lowest-cost health plan in Milwaukee County — sold by Molina Healthcare — requires 30% coinsurance payments if someone is hospitalized, until the out-of-pocket maximum of $6,850 is reached.

Even for common health care expenses, the limited coverage provided by some plans sold on the marketplaces can be frustrating.

Kathryn Bruce, 28, bought the least expensive health plan this year. She pays only $15 a month, but the plan has a $5,000 deductible. When she got the flu and her doctor prescribed Tamiflu, an antiviral medication, she learned that it would cost her $400.

“I was just blown away by it,” said Bruce, who lives in Milwaukee. “They can diagnose you, which is free. But getting better is the most expensive part.”

The only way insurance works is when there are a lot of people who buy it and don’t use it. For health insurance, that means a lot of young, healthy people need to buy insurance to pay for the old, sick people who use it. But when the insurance is so expensive, it is difficult for a young, healthy person to justify it. And for the vast majority of those young people who choose to go without insurance, they will be just fine. In hindsight, it will be a good bet for them.

But Obamacare can’t tolerate such decisions. The young people who do not need health insurance NEED to pay into it so that the old people can have their bills paid. So our government will now force the young folks to pay a bunch of money for insurance they don’t need.

Of course, health insurance is always a good idea to protect yourself in the event you have a catastrophic health need, but we, as a society, could have addressed that sliver of circumstances without the monstrosity that is Obamacare.