During the Obamacare sign-up period, only 9.2 million people signed up for Obamacare, down from 9.6 million in 2016. (Luhby) President Donald Trump openly established that he plans to repeal and replace Obamacare and the effects of his words are already alarming many Americans into giving up on Obamacare. In order to understand the significance of Obamacare, one must understand the context. Barack Obama enacted the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act in 2010 in order to reduce the overall costs of health care, expand coverage to many more Americans, and ultimately make health care more affordable. Although Obamacare has been successful in insuring tens of millions more Americans and not denying services to those with pre-existing conditions,…show more content… Because of this, Obamacare is not sustainable when it hurts insurers who must provide for millions of enrollees. In fact, many insurers are essentially forced to drop out of state health care exchanges where many insurers compete to keep health care prices low and affordable for the insured. CEO of insurer, Aetna, whose company stopped selling Obamacare plans in eleven out of fifteen state exchanges in August of 2016 stated, “The exchanges are a mess as they exist today” and that the exchanges are “losing a lot of money for a lot of people.” (Tracer) This means that Obamacare is costing insurers a large sum of money and this puts the insured at risk to suffer with them, for there will be less competition in the exchanges. Once again, Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini reported that Aetna would possibly consider a return to some state exchanges in 2020 and also credited the fall of Aetna to the lack of balance in the number of sick and healthy patients to balance costs for insurers. This shows that the impact of Obamacare on Aetna had severity that prevents them from returning for years to come which is not a healthy attribute for a sustainable entitlement system because if insurers cannot provide, there is no Obamacare. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, because of insurer dropouts like the situation with Aetna, fifty-seven percent of exchange enrollees will have a choice of only at least insurers in 2017 which is down from eighty-five percent in 2016. (Cox) This shows that an insurer pulling out of exchanges has a negative impact on enrollees because they do not have as varied of a range of options and therefore this problem affects insurers and enrollees
