UnitedHealth Group Weighing Return To Obamacare Markets

UnitedHealth Group is looking at re-entering markets to sell individual coverage under the Affordable Care Act after a several-year absence.

UnitedHealth’s UnitedHealthcare business was among several big health insurers including Humana and Aetna that stopped selling individual coverage under the ACA known as Obamacare. Many of these insurers who left the individual business were unable to successfully manage the rising costs of uninsured Americans signing up for coverage.

In recent years, however, some health insurers see a more stable market and are looking at re-entering markets they left. UnitedHealth announced it was leaving the ACA’s exchanges at the end of 2015 and withdrew in 2016.

“We began to look at participating in more exchanges prior to the COVID-19 crisis,” UnitedHealthcare chief executive Dirk McMahon told analysts Wednesday on UnitedHealth’s first quarter earnings call. “We’re still in the process of going through market-by-market, evaluating the relative efficiency of our network, our ability to compete and states where we would like to extend Medicaid.”

Today, UnitedHealthcare sells coverage on the ACA’s public exchanges in only three states: Massachusetts, New York and Nevada. UnitedHealth executives said they would have an update on potential future markets during the second-quarter earnings call in three months.