Does This Major Insurance Company Know Something We Don’t About ObamaCare Being Delayed?

The White House has insistently said that, despite the severe glitches facing the ObamaCare website and reports that not enough young people are signing up, they are not going to delay the enrollment deadline.

One major insurance company, though, says it is planning for the White House to delay the enrollment.

What do they know that we don’t? Is the White House telling the American people one thing while simultaneously telling the insurance companies another? Is the Obama Administration finally realizing what millions of Americans already know, that ObamaCare isn’t working?

We should be able to expect more transparency than this.

From Reuters:

(Reuters) – A top U.S. health insurer gave the first detailed view of how the problem-plagued rollout of President Barack Obama’s signature healthcare law is affecting the industry, saying on Wednesday it had cut its enrollment forecasts by at least a half and expected the government to delay the sign-up deadline.

Humana Inc said that because of technical problems preventing millions of Americans from accessing the federal HealthCare.gov website since it opened on October 1, the company had slashed its expectations of signing on 500,000 new plan members to an estimate of closer to 250,000.

The open enrollment period ends on March 31, and Republican and Democratic lawmakers are asking the Obama administration to give people more time to sign up for plans offered in online marketplaces. U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius rejected the idea at a Senate hearing on Wednesday.

“We are still at the beginning of a six-month open enrollment that ends at the end of March, and there’s plenty of time to sign up for the new plans,” she said. 

UnitedHealth Group, the largest healthcare insurer in the United States, said on Wednesday it would work with the federal government “if a decision is made to allow individuals more time to sign up.”

The insurance industry has lobbied against an extension that would include delaying the law’s penalty for Americans who do not obtain coverage by the end of March, saying it would leave them with a heavier concentration of sicker, costlier patients. That would create even greater business losses and higher prices for consumers down the road, and could require the federal government to come in and cover some of the damage.

But Humana said on Wednesday it was assuming a delay at this point, and that it already cut its view for profits from the new business that it had expected from healthcare reform.

“We’re waiting for guidance from the government around whether they are going to change mandates and whether they are going to do things to extend the enrollment period,” Humana Chief Operating Officer Jim Murray said during a call with investors to discuss quarterly results.

“Given where we’re at today, our assumption is that there will be an extension to the open enrollment period,” he said.