Health insurers to meet Trump on Obamacare plans

Bloomberg

Top US health insurance executives will meet on Monday with President Donald Trump, according to people familiar with plans for the session, a sign of the White House’s deepening involvement in efforts to repeal and replace Obamacare.
Attendees will include chief executives of some of the biggest US health insurers, like UnitedHealth Group Inc., Aetna Inc., Cigna Corp., Independence Blue Cross and BlueCross BlueShield of North Carolina.
Trump has called the Affordable Care Act a failure, and said he’ll replace it with a plan providing better, cheaper coverage, without giving details. The president has held a series of meetings with executives from other industries, including drugmakers, to discuss their priorities and tout job creation. White House spokesmen didn’t return a request for comment on the meeting. Anthem Inc., which was also invited, didn’t confirm whether its executives will attend.
Republicans in the House of Representatives are working to come up with a strategy to repeal and replace the health law, though they acknowledge that their current proposal will cover fewer people.
Major for-profit health insurers, with the exception of Anthem and Cigna, have largely pulled back from Obamacare, opting to stop selling coverage in many markets. Humana Inc. said this month that it would quit Obamacare for next year, while Aetna Chief Executive Officer Mark Bertolini said this month that the markets were “in a death spiral.”
Insurers selling under the Blue Cross and Blue Shield brand have typically remained in Obamacare. The companies, other than Anthem, are mainly not for profits. The head of the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association, Scott Serota, plans to attend, according to the group. Molina Healthcare Inc., a major provider of insurance under Obamacare, wasn’t invited, according to the company.