Bryan Rotella, contributor
Since the 2010 passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA or ObamaCar), the health care industry has seen record growth and increased revenues. Why? Illness, especially chronic, sadly is a moneymaking business. Illness requires more office visits, more hospitalizations and inevitably more bills. ObamaCare halted insurance companies’ practice of rating premiums based on a customers illness history, or as more commonly known, preexisting conditions.
In the 2013 rollout of the ObamaCare exchanges, the promised result was that more people would have insurance coverage. Undoubtedly, this part of the law worked. By Jan. 7, 2016, more than 11.3 millionAmericans had signed up for ObamaCare; by March,20.3 million were covered. A large percentage of these new insureds were high-risk. As NBC reportedin April, “Last month, an analysis of medical claims from the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association concluded that insurers gained a sicker, more expensive patient population as a result of the law.”
While bad for insurance companies, this was very good for the bottom lines of the merging large healthcare systems and newly formed physician monolith groups. A drafter of the lawadmitted the law was founded on the belief that the “consolidation of doctors into larger physician groups was inevitable and desirable.” With consolidation, the dollars have racked up. According to U.S. News & World Report, “from June 3, 2010, to June 30, 2015, the Russell 3000 Healthcare benchmark (an all capitalization index) posted a gain of 176.8 percent.”
