If you did, hope you got a warranty. Unlike Edie Littlefield Sundby, who is now under attack from the Salesman in Chief, for believing him;
Sundby shouldn’t blame reform — United Healthcare dropped her coverage because they’ve struggled to compete in California’s individual health care market for years and didn’t want to pay for sicker patients like Sundby.
The company, which only had 8,000 individual policy holders in California out of the two million who participate in the market, announced (along with a second insurer, Aetna) that it would be pulling out of the individual market in May. The company could not compete with Anthem Blue Cross, Blue Shield of California and Kaiser Permanente, who control more than 80 percent of the individual market. “Over the years, it has become more difficult to administer these plans in a cost-effective way for our members,” UnitedHealth spokeswoman Cheryl Randolph explained. “We will continue to keep a major presence in California, focusing instead on large and small employers.”
The two insurers were also operating at a tax disadvantage in the state. As California Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones explained, “One of the factors I believe contributed to this decision….is the special tax break that California law gives to Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield, which has allowed and continues to allow those two companies to avoid paying $100 million in state taxes a year.” “Aetna and United Healthcare don’t get the special tax break provided to Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield, and so they faced a major competitive disadvantage in California.”Hidden in all that blather is that the numerous times Barack Obama said that nothing like that would happen, he was either lying, or conspicuously ill-informed about his own law.
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