Divining Insurance Industry Silence On Obamacare Repeal

Kevin Drum asks an interesting question about the curious silence of the insurance companies regarding the chaos surrounding GOP plans to “repeal and replace” Obamacare, or any of its variants, and the disastrous effect on the individual market and the insurance companies’ bottom line. Asks Drum, “This makes their silence hard to understand. Are they biding their time? Have they given up? Are they lobbying hard, but doing it very quietly? Aside from the people [who] would be left without medical care under a Republican repeal, insurers stand to lose the most. Why aren’t they being more public about this?”

One potential answer is that every executive these days is petrified of doing anything to offend Trump for fear he will target them with a twitter bomb that will tank their stock price. More likely, however, is that a large number of the corporate CEOs in this country are ideologues just as extreme as the Republican party. One of the biggest reasons why there are fewer healthy people in the Obamacare exchanges than anticipated is not because those young millennials did not sign up. It is because far fewer companies actually dropped their employee sponsored plans and moved their employees to Obamacare, even though that might have been cheaper for the company. I’m also guessing that whatever they lose with the collapse of the individual market will be at least partially made up for by being able to sell those “junk” insurance plans again and the enormous tax cuts that Trump and the GOP will give them. I’m also pretty sure that none of those CEOs really view health care as a right and care very little about the number of uninsured in this country. I’d like to think they are negotiating behind the scenes and lobbying hard just like I’d like to think Trump will respect the rule of law. But that’s just wishful thinking.