(Bloomberg) -- UnitedHealth Group Inc. should have stayed out of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act's new individual markets longer, the chief executive officer of the biggest U.S. health insurer said Tuesday, after announcing last month that it will take hundreds of millions of dollars in losses related to the business.
Instead of expanding into PPACA next year, the company should have kept waiting, UnitedHealth CEO Stephen Hemsley said at an investor meeting in New York.
“It was for us a bad decision,” Hemsley said. “I take accountability for sitting out the exchange market in year one so we could in theory observe, learn and see how the market experience would develop. This was a prudent going-in position. In retrospect, we should have stayed out longer.”
UnitedHealth said on Nov. 19 that it may quit selling coverage in PPACA's individual markets in 2017.
The markets are a key element of the law’s goal to cover about 10 million Americans next year, and UnitedHealth had expanded its offerings for 2016, after initially holding off when the markets started covering people in 2014.
Losses from the plans this year and next will total more than half a billion dollars, the company has said, and UnitedHealth will scale back efforts to market coverage to millions of people shopping for 2016 insurance on PPACA's new marketplaces.
UnitedHealth is not alone in its PPACA struggles.
Other insurers, including competitors Anthem Inc. and Aetna Inc., have also either suffered losses in the markets or said they haven’t seen the margins they expected.
Next year will be the law’s third of providing coverage.
“It will take more than a season or two for this market to develop,” Hemsley said. “We did not believe it would form this slowly, be this porous, or become this severe.”
Hemsley said today that the rest of UnitedHealth’s businesses are faring better than its comparatively small exchange operation, which it has said covers about 540,000 people. The company said it expects operating earnings of $13.1 billion to $13.5 billion next year, on revenue of $180 billion to $181 billion.
Enrollment at the company’s insurance businesses will climb to 47.4 million to 48.2 million people next year, from 46.2 million at the end of 2015.
The company is projecting more enrollees in line of business including Medicare Advantage and Medicaid. Separately, UnitedHealth said its drug-coverage business for the elderly, Medicare Part D, may lose as many as 650,000 customers.
Across all of its insurance businesses, UnitedHealth said it expects to spend about 81.5 cents of every dollar it takes in from premiums on medical expenses.
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