Mark Bertolini is the CEO of Aetna (NYSE: AET). Yesterday, he gave an extended interview with the WSJ’s Dennis Berman on the topic of the future of health care, in which he made big news by describing the Affordable Care Act (ACA), which is more popularly known as Obamacare, by saying that “it is in a death spiral.”
But the part of his comments that really stood out to us came just after the 14-minute mark of the interview, where he said:
You know that mathematics education in the United States is working when someone says, let’s see, I’m going to pay this much premium, I’ve got a $6,000 deductible, the average deductible across the country is $3,600 dollars, it’s up 15% this year alone, right, and when I go to the doctor I’m going to pay cash, nobody anticipates spending a day in the hospital or going to the doctor more than once… so premium, plus deductible, plus paying cash… why do I do this? I’ll just pay the penalty and move on.
We here at Political Calculations have been happy to help provide Americans with that particular mathematics education since 17 September 2013, when we introduced our tool “ObamaCare: Should You Pay the Premium or the Tax?” (a 2017 version is also available), in which we made the kind of personal finance math described by Bertolini easy to do for any American with an Internet connection.
So, in a way of speaking, we’re the solution to the game of Clue featuring the all-but-confirmed death of Obamacare: it was Political Calculations, on the Internet, with Math!
That said, we do have some thoughts on how to address the situation that Bertolini describes as the result of the adverse selection that has drawn in the sickest Americans eligible for Obamacare while driving out the healthiest Americans. In our view, that outcome will be exceptionally valuable in making good on the failed promise of Obamacare to provide people with pre-existing conditions with the ability to obtain affordable health insurance coverage. Unlike the other failed Obamacare promise that “if you like your health care plan, you can keep it”, we think it may be possible to make that kind of health insurance portability a reality, so long as it can be separated from the all the other, excessively wasteful baggage of the Affordable Care Act.
If you want a teaser, we think that the solution to that issue is not subsidized health insurance, but rather reinsurance, which is an idea that we’ll explore more at a later date.
In the meantime, if you’d like to see what else Aetna’s CEO had to say on about the future of health care, here’s the WSJ’s full video of the 50-minute interview, but we’ll warn you in advance that it starts off with over four and a half minutes of some especially awful background music before it gets going.
