Analysts at Moody's Investors Service say that Health Care Service Corp. looks as if it's big enough and strong enough to handle the turmoil in the Affordable Care Act public exchange market.
Health Care Service Corp., a member-owned company based in Chicago, is the parent of Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Illinois and Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Texas. It provides or administers major medical coverage for about 14.6 million people, including 800,000 people with exchange plan coverage.
Dean Unger and other analysts at Moody's also look at three other big, rated insurers in the new report: Anthem Inc., Centene Corp. and Molina Healthcare Inc.
Public investors own stock in those three companies. Because those companies are publicly traded, they post regular reports on their ACA exchange plan programs, and their executives talk about the exchange system in quarterly conference calls with securities analysts.
Molina, a company that provides or administers major medical coverage for a total of 4.7 million people, including 949,000 exchange plan enrollees, continues to have problems with pricing its exchange plan coverage, according to the Moody's analysts.
Anthem has 1 million ACA exchange plan enrollees, but 35 million major medical enrollees overall. Exchange plans make up such a small part of Anthem's business that any losses on the plans are unlikely to have a material effect on Anthem's performance, the Moody's analysts say.
Centene, a company with 12 million major medical enrollees, and 1.1 million exchange plan enrollees, appears to be using its experience in the Medicaid market to develop a successful exchange plan operation, the analysts say.
Health Care Service Corp.. which has received much less media attention that the publicly traded companies, lost money in 2014 and 2015 because of problems with its ACA exchange plans, the analysts note.
