More bad news on the Obamacare front:
Aetna’s (NYSE:AET) ObamaCare exchange statistics should clear up any doubt as to why the Obama Administration has been tight-lipped about enrollment since celebrating 8 million sign-ups in mid-April.
Reality, evidence suggests, could require quite a come-down from those lofty claims.
The nation’s third-largest health insurer had 720,000 people sign up for exchange coverage as of May 20, a spokesman confirmed to IBD. At the end of June, it had fewer than 600,000 paying customers. Aetna expects that to fall to “just over 500,000” by the end of the year.
[snip]
It’s not clear how representative Aetna’s experience is of broader exchange trends, or whether its projection may be too conservative. (If it were representative, a similar 30% decline would drop ObamaCare enrollment to 6 million or less.)
Still, as one of ObamaCare’s largest players, participating in exchanges in 16 states plus D.C., Aetna’s experience provides a pretty good window into what is happening across the country, and there are other indications that enrollment has turned down.
Cigna (NYSE:CI) said that it expects its individual market customers, including more than 100,000 in the exchanges, to “move from 300,000 down to 280,000 in that range,” Cigna CEO David Cordani said in a conference call.
Other major insurers danced around questions about attrition on recent earnings conference calls, but none denied that it was occurring.
This, ladies and gentlemen, is what happens when you go after people who think your administration is going to give you everything free:
Many of them no doubt assumed that the Obamacare policies were gonna be free, so they didn’t think they needed to pay the premiums.
And, the Obama administration was so desperate to get some good news about Obamacare out there that they pushed the numbers to the leftistmedia without waiting to see how many would actually send a check when the premiums were due.
Just more smoke and mirrors from the Obamacrats.
Imagine my surprise. Good eye on that one CW.