12/23/2024

UnitedHealth Makes Good on Threat to Pull Out of Obamacare

The Affordable Care Act suffered another jolt late last week with the news that UnitedHealth Group, the nation’s largest health insurer, was making good on its threat to pull out of Obamacare, beginning with its operations in Georgia and Arkansas.

UnitedHealth roiled the market last November when it revealed that it was considering exiting Obamacare after incurring hundreds of millions of dollars in losses related to ACA business. Then UnitedHealth CEO Stephen Hemsley confessed to investors meeting in New York in December that the company should have stayed out of the program a little longer to better gauge its profitability potential.

UnitedHealth CEO: Joining Obamacare Was a ‘Bad Decision’

The company had cautiously tiptoed into the market in January 2015 after sitting out the first full year of Obamacare operations in 2014. “It was for us a bad decision,” Hemsley admitted to his investors. “In retrospect, we should have stayed out longer.”

View Article