Freedom-Hater-care's ongoing damage to post-America

I can lend a personal testimony to this set of developments.

I had a policy with Assurant Health for several years.  Yes, the premium was stiff, but that's because it was a catastrophic-care policy only, which, in a truly free market, would be the only kind of health insurance most people would need (and the premium would be lower).  In fact, the premium came down a bit when FHer-care was enacted, because Assurant was no longer able to ding me for my high blood pressure.  How the company was expected to cover that cost is not apparent.

And that only lasted for about a year.  Then the premium shot up again as more features of FHer-care were implemented.

So I swallowed hard and went looking on the damn government exchange for something else and indeed found a policy with much lower premiums due to the fact that it was subsidized.  That's right, I have a cushy health-insurance situation because the government is seizing my fellow citizens' money at gunpoint to make that possible.  And if I make more money this year - something I, along with most post-Americans, aspire to -  that will change next year.

But how fares my old provider?  Here's how:

The parent company of Assurant Health said Tuesday that it will sell or shut down the Milwaukee health insurer — which employs 1,200 people in the area — by the end of next year.

Assurant Health has struggled to adjust to changes in the health insurance market imposed by the Affordable Care Act and is expected to report an operating loss of $80 million to $90 million in its first quarter. That comes after it lost $64 million last year.

The company, whose headquarters is in downtown Milwaukee, specializes in health insurance for small employers and individuals, the two market segments that have faced the most changes from the Affordable Care Act.

"They are a casualty of the ACA," said Steven Schwartz, an analyst with Raymond James & Associates.

Assurant Inc., the parent company based in New York, said it is exploring a sale. Absent that, it will not sell health insurance policies in 2016 and will shut down the business.

The announcement leaves the fate of Assurant Health's 1,700 employees companywide, most of them in the Milwaukee region, in doubt.

Assurant also said it is exploring the sale of its employee benefits business, which sells dental, short-term and long-term disability, and life insurance.

"While it is a difficult decision, we believe they would be strong assets for new owners that are focused more exclusively on health care and employee benefits," Alan Colberg, the parent company's president and chief executive officer, said in a statement.

Assurant instead plans to focus on its niche insurance products, including extended-service contracts, mobile-housing insurance, vehicle-service contracts and prepaid funeral plans.

Assurant Health's ties to Milwaukee go back to 1900, when the La Crosse Mutual Aid Association moved to the city and changed its name to Time Insurance Co.

Analysts began speculating as far back as late 2011 that Assurant might exit the health insurance business.

The Affordable Care Act barred health insurers from turning away customers because of pre-existing health conditions. That new regulation negated one of Assurant Health's strengths: underwriting, or determining which potential customers were the best risks.

"That went away," said Schwartz of Raymond James.

The law also required health plans to cover a package of basic benefits and required health insurers to spend at least 80 cents of every premium dollar on medical care or quality initiatives.

The changes forced Assurant Health to move quickly to cut costs and eliminate jobs.

And the subsidy thing I'm enjoying with my new provider may not be the sweet deal it looks like at the moment.  That's certainly the case for people who went with a gummint-propped plan the first go-round:

Providing still more evidence of how ObamaCare is "working," most enrollees learned this year that they had to pay back a huge chunk of their insurance subsidies. So much for "affordability."

Back in January, H&R Block figured that about half of the 6.8 million people who were getting ObamaCare subsidies would owe some of the money back. Another expert reckoned the average payback at $208.

That was enough to set off alarms about the "unpleasant tax surprise" these millions would face. The tax experts were too optimistic, however. H&R Block now figures that two-thirds of ObamaCare enrollees who got subsidies had to pay at least some of it back. And the average payback was $729.

So roughly 5.5 million ObamaCare enrollees had to return, on average, almost a quarter of their premium subsidies. Given that these subsidies are available only to families with modest incomes, that's got to hurt.

(H&R Block also found that a quarter of ObamaCare enrollees got an average of $425 in additional tax credits for last year.)

Why all the subsidy mistakes? Because ObamaCare uses a Rube Goldberg subsidy scheme that requires enrollees to predict next year's income. If they guess too low, their insurance subsidies will be too high. Overestimate their income and the subsidies will be too low.

H&R Block also found that the average penalty paid by the uninsured last year was $178. That no doubt was also a surprise to many who thought it would be just $95.

Here's a novel idea: Get government completely out of health care.

Freedom is always elegantly simple compared to bureaucratic schemes.  And it's less likely to present people with rude shocks, since, with freedom, they are in charge of their own destinies.