Obamacare Killing Many Types of Health Insurance Plans

Just as the opponents of Obamacare predicted, the new healthcare law is causing insurance companies to cancel various types of insurance policies because unlike the government, private insurance companies cannot survive by operating at a loss.  Here are stories about recent policy cancellations:

• “Kids 0, Insurance 0 – The first fruits of ObamaCare” – “This week, almost every big insurance company in America—including Aetna, Cigna, UnitedHealth Group, WellPoint, Humana, Coventry, some Blue Cross Blue Shield affiliates and others—stopped writing “child-only” policies in the individual market. This is a niche product that parents typically buy when their employer health plan doesn’t cover dependents.”
• “Two Minnesota insurers stop selling individual policies” – “HealthPartners says it is temporarily suspending sales of individual health insurance policies due to uncertainty created by the new federal law.”
• “A Future for Student Health Plans?” – “Sandy Praeger, a Republican who is Kansas’s insurance commissioner, isn’t sure student plans will be able to survive much past 2014. . . . ‘If I were the CEO [of a student insurer], I’d start looking for some alternatives to compete in a different way or figure out some other businesses to go into’.”