UnitedHealthcare

Back in November, one of the big ACA stories was UnitedHealthcare, shortly after releasing third quarter financial results which made it sound like all was well with their ACA exchange business, dropping a bombshell only a month later stating that they were losing hundreds of millions of dollars on the exchanges and were very likely to drop out next year.

This caused all sorts of shockwaves among the insurance industry, and of course gave ACA critics more ammunition with which to attack Obamacare as a whole, calling it evidence of the system being a failure, etc etc...even though several other major insurance carriers on the exchanges didn't seem to be complaining (or at least weren't making it out to be nearly as dire of a situation as UHC).

At the end of December, UnitedHealthcare (along with some other carriers) complained about CMS publicly posting their proposed rate increases:

Hat tip to someone named "Chuck" (no last name or organization given) for the tip.

Yet Another Post® about UnitedHealthcare, I'm afraid. Healthcare pundits/reporters have found last week's United announcement extremely oddly-timed, especially given that they were giving a very positive outlook for the ACA exchanges just a month earlier.

In short: UHC sat out the ACA exchanges in 2014, dove into half the states head first for 2015, expanded into another 11 states for 2016...but then suddenly announced that they "may" drop out of the exchanges completely in 2017? Furthermore, they made this announcement a month after painting a glowing outlook in their official quarterly report and did so in the middle of the 2016 open enrollment period? Something doesn't sound right here.

Well, today I've learned another tidbit which seems odd to me, although it's possible that there's nothing amiss here:

After UnitedHealthcare freaked everyone in the health insurance investor community out (along with enrollees, politicians, healthcare reporters/pundits, etc.) with their Thursday morning announcement that they might drop off the ACA exchanges in 2017, just 2 years after entering the exchanges and just 1 month after painting a rosy picture of the situation, several other major players in the individual market decided to calm everyone the hell down:

U.S. health insurers Aetna Inc and Anthem Inc on Friday sought to reassure investors that their Obamacare businesses had not worsened after UnitedHealth Group Inc warned of mounting losses in that sector.

Aetna and Anthem said their individual insurance businesses, which include the plans created by President Barack Obama's national healthcare reform law, had performed in line with projections through October. Both backed their earnings forecasts for 2015.

UPDATE: I've gotten the OK from my source, Joshua Dickerson, to give him a public should-out for the heads up.

Regular readers know that although I do spend a lot of time updating this website, I do still have to do my day job running a website development firm. As a result, I'm simply not able to keep up with every healthcare-related hot tip which comes my way.

So, when the following link was forwarded to me a few days ago, while I did find out more details from the sender, I didn't happen to get around to actually posting anything about it before today:

UnitedHealthcare Announces Changes to 2016 Exchange Sales and Compensation

Over the past few months, we've seen an acceleration of changes in the health insurance market. UnitedHealthcare is continually evaluating all aspects of the evolving exchanges so that we can provide coverage options that best meet consumers' health care and financial needs.