UnitedHealth Group Inc raised new questions about the viability of Obamacare on Thursday, saying that in 2017 it might stop selling individual plans on the insurance exchanges created under U.S. President Barack Obama's healthcare law.
The largest U.S. health insurer cited weak enrollment and high medical costs for people who did sign up. Rivals Aetna Inc and Anthem Inc said last month that they were seeing too few people enroll but have not signaled they would exit the business.
"We cannot sustain these losses," UnitedHealth Chief Executive Stephen Hemsley said during a conference call with investors. "We can't really subsidize a marketplace that doesn't appear at the moment to be sustaining itself."
A deterioration in the exchanges in the midst of the 2016 election campaign could provide additional fuel to Republican efforts to overturn the healthcare law. Several of Obama's fellow Democrats are also considering changes to the Affordable Care Act, including whether to alter the "Cadillac tax," a levy on high-cost health plans sponsored by employers.
The U.S. government said that the exchanges were continuing to grow and giving millions of Americans access to affordable insurance.
"Every day, tens of thousands more Americans turn to the Health Insurance Marketplace for health coverage and even more return to the Marketplace for another year," U.S. Department of Health and Human Services spokesman Ben Wakana said in a statement.
The company plans to evaluate during the first half of next year whether it would continue to offer Obamacare plans in 2017.
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