Partners HealthCare yesterday tied a $34 million quarterly loss to the state's disastrous implementation of Obamacare, and an industry group warned that other health plans are struggling to survive as the state tries to fix the failed website.
"It's been fairly severe," Partners Chief Financial Officer Peter Markell told the Herald. "We're talking with the state and hoping we can get these problems fixed. It's a major league issue."
Partners is losing approximately $1.5 million a month as the state scrambles to relaunch an Obamacare website in time for fall open enrollment. The original site crashed and burned shortly after it went live last October, and some 251,280 Bay Staters are now on free transitional Medicaid insurance at a cost to taxpayers of $173 million.
Partners operates Neighborhood Health Plan, which insures 325,700 patients.
The Massachusetts Association of Health Plans yesterday warned Partners is hardly alone in suffering losses related to the state's failed implementation of Obamacare. Health plans' losses had already been accelerating because of unexpectedly high medical and pharmaceutical costs, said president Lora Pellegrini.
"Compounding this is the failure of the state's website, the creation of temporary coverage and the unbudgeted costs the (managed care organizations) have incurred to support the IT and operational requirements needed to ensure that residents have access to coverage during open enrollment this coming November."
Pellegrini added the costs "go beyond any reasonably budgeted losses" the health plans could absorb.
"They are increasingly being asked to do much more with much more limited resources," she said. "They cannot continue to sustain year-over-year losses of this magnitude."
Partners, meanwhile, also blamed its quarterly loss on an influx of 61,000 additional MassHealth patients to Neighborhood Health who generated "substantially higher" medical claims, leading to a cost increase of $28 million.
Partners attributed $10 million in costs to a "breakthrough" Hepatitis C drug that the state has not yet agreed to cover.
Markell called on state officials to increase rates.
"There's no way we're getting actuarially sound rates," Markell said.
Secretary of Administration & Finance Glen Shor told the Herald the state couldn't corroborate the claim that the MassHealth influx has led to higher than expected costs.
"We're working with them to better understand what is driving their financial performance," he said.
"Once again it highlights the turmoil that's being caused by the changes due to the ACA in Massachusetts as people switch plans, as people sign up who didn't have coverage before," said Joshua Archambault of the Pioneer Institute. "It only exacerbates the costs of the implementation because of state officials' errors."
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