Ed Pieczynski: Basically blackmail

So, in the Aug. 17 column “Time for hardball with insurers,” the writer advocated blackmailing companies like Aetna, United Health and Humana into providing insurance in the Obamacare insurance exchange. He even claimed that these insurance companies should show the Obama administration some “gratitude” for ACA.

Last I checked these are all publicly traded companies and as such have fiduciary responsibilities to their millions of stockholders. I’m just guessing that one of those responsibilities is not to intentionally lose money on Obama’s social experiment.

These losses should not come as a surprise to anyone. When companies were required to insure all patients with pre-existing conditions and not enough young healthy people bought in, the system was destined to fail.

A recent study of hundreds of exchanges estimated that in 2014 premiums would have had to be raised an additional 24 percent just to cover costs. Yes, ACA needs to be fixed, but blackmailing American companies into losing hundreds of millions of dollars annually is not the answer.

This story was originally published September 4, 2016 at 6:00 PM with the headline "Ed Pieczynski: Basically blackmail."