Democrats spent the last four years trying to expand Obamacare enrollment, largely by ramping up federal premium subsidies. However, the health coverage available through the exchanges often doesn’t do much good, as too many Obamacare enrollees discover when a medical bill comes due.
According to new research from KFF, health insurers operating through the federal exchanges denied 1 in 5 claims in 2023. In other words, the United States is funneling billions of taxpayer dollars to insurance companies so they can deny claims. It’s long past time for officials to curtail their corporate welfare for insurers.
The new KFF report analyzed transparency data from health insurance companies that operated through HealthCare.gov in 2023. On average, insurers denied 19% of in-network claims and 37% of out-of-network claims — or 20% total. In-network denial rates for individual insurers varied from 1% to a whopping 54%.
Some of the country’s biggest insurance companies scored worse than average.