The New England Journal of Medicine appears to have plunged deep into the debate on health insurance reform since Trump was elected, and in its 9th March issue has a series of articles and opinion pieces on Obamacare’s effects. This includes a piece pointing out that Obamacare expanded access to treatment for substance addiction, including opioid addiction (a big and growing problem in the US at the moment) and also a research article examining the impact of the medicaid expansion on specific health and health financing outcomes (the findings: it was broadly very positive). It also has a short research article examining the claim that the individual insurance markets have been thrown into a death spiral by the poor design of the law.

This claim has been going around for about a year now, and is generally based around the fact that some insurers have left some markets, and in some cases blamed Obamacare for their decision. For example, Zero Hedge made this claim in 2015, and the National Review took it up in July 2016. Articles discussing the alleged failings of the exchanges typically point to the withdrawal of big companies such as Aetna from some exchanges, suggesting that these companies are withdrawing because the fundamental dynamic of the exchanges prevents them from making a profit. This is important in the US context because for people earning above 138% of the federal poverty line who do not have employer-based insurance, the best and most efficient way for them to get insurance coverage is through a marketplace called an exchange, which is a special clearinghouse for selecting Obamacare-compliant insurance plans that is set up either by your state or by the federal government if your state refused to cooperate with the law. (An example of a generally well-liked exchange in a Republican-run state is Kentucky’s Kynect exchange). Obamacare’s defenders have pointed out that some consolidation is natural in markets when they change, and that new entrants or changing business practices will naturally force some businesses to fail or leave – that’s capitalism! Under this defense, the exchanges are working as intended and there’s nothing to worry about, except that in some smaller states this process may lead to a collapse of competition as only one or two insurers remain – a problem Clinton intended to fix by introducing a public provider in all markets if she won the presidential election.

The new article in the NEJM explores this issue in detail, by collecting data on all the plans that operated in exchanges from 2016 – 2017 and comparing those that left with those that remained. The authors make the particular point that once the exchanges opened the marketplace itself changed, and this had implications for insurers. They say:

In particular, the ACA’s insurance-market reforms required firms to develop and market new products that were attractive to low-income Americans who faced few access and pricing restrictions based on their underlying health status.

This means that organizations that are unfamiliar with these market conditions might struggle. They explain this as follows:

Anecdotal evidence supports the argument that the skills of particular insurers may not have been well suited to these marketplaces. Many of the exiting firms, such as UnitedHealth, have primarily covered enrollees in the self-insured–employer market, in which insurers provide administrative services and are not primarily responsible for bearing actuarial risk or for developing products targeting low-income consumers. In addition, many of the assets that have proven quite valuable in the self-insured market — such as a large national footprint that is attractive to multistate employers — may not be particularly useful in state-based individual insurance marketplaces.

They then present the results of their detailed assessment of the properties of those businesses that entered or left the market place, which they summarize in a table, reproduced as Table 1 below.

Table 1: The characteristics of leavers

This table makes clear that the insurers who left the marketplace in 2016 were offering more expensive plans with narrower networks and lower levels of behavioral health coverage; they were also much more likely to be bigger actors in the market for fully-insured people and much less likely to have experience in Medicaid markets. Overall this suggests that these companies left the exchanges not because the exchanges were flawed, but because these companies were not experienced in targeting low-income Americans who make up a large share of the individual insurance market, and having made a play at the individual market decided to get out when they were out-competed by organizations with more experience in the marketplace. The authors further note that actually a lot of the insurers active in the exchange markets are making a profit and are aggressively targeting new marketplaces – but these insurers tend to be smaller organizations with experience in Medicaid services, and don’t attract the same attention as the big employer-market insurers who failed.

This study isn’t definitive and has some limitations – for example it did not compare leavers in 2016 with historical leavers before Obamacare was implemented, and it only compared silver plans (which are the most popular but not necessarily the most profitable, I guess). Nonetheless, it gives the lie to the claim that Obamacare’s exchanges are not working, or at least suggests that they are working well enough to warrant tweaks and improvements rather than complete abolition. Once again the NEJM has shown that Obamacare’s opponents are long on rhetoric and short on facts, and that although this health care law is not perfect, it is doing okay and is certainly a significant improvement on the status quo. Let’s hope that whatever reforms proceed over the next two years will lead to improvements in the areas that are not working, and not wholesale destruction of America’s best chance at universal health coverage in half a century.