This is not necessarily breaking news—-insurers are pulling out of North Carolina’s 2017 Obamacare health insurance exchange, possibly leaving 90 counties—-that’s 90 percent—with only one exchange insurer:
Most North Carolinians — including those in the Triad — are projected to have just one insurer’s plans to choose from in the 2017 federal individual health exchange, according to a report by Kaiser Family Foundation.
Only Alamance is projected to have Blue Cross Blue Shield of N.C. and Cigna Healthcare of N.C. among the 14 counties in the Triad and Northwest N.C.
The nonprofit’s analysis, released Sunday, projected about 613,000 exchange enrollees statewide, about 1,000 fewer than for 2016.
Enrollees typically receive a federal tax credit to subsidize their monthly premium cost.Perhaps the starkest 2017 change for North Carolina comes from projections of no enrollees having at least three insurer options in their counties, compared with 409,000 enrollees in 2016.
Instead, 80 percent of projected enrollees, or 490,000, likely will have only Blue Cross. That includes a projected 21,700 in Forsyth County and 101,800 in the Triad and Northwest N.C.
North Carolina is mentioned in the Fox news piece below reporting —-imagine this–that Obamacare exchange enrollments are falling way short of projections for 2017.
Funniest part of the Fox news report is the breaking news that President Obama will meet with Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell to discuss changes to Obamacare for 2018. That’s a nice sentiment, I reckon—our president is full of wonderful sentiments—but we all know it could be a radically different world in 2018 for a wide variety of reasons.
