Consulting Magazine - February 2017

4 FEBRUARY 2017 Consulting®
ShortTakes Trends, Views and Analysis
The End of Obamacare?

Oliver Wyman’s Stone on what’s next for healthcare and the ACA under Trump

During the highly contested

2016 U.S. presidential election, Donald Trump made dismantling Obamacare—the Affordable Care Act—a cornerstone promise of his campaign. Now with him in the White House, everyone on the healthcare continuum, from the insured themselves to providers to the payers are anxiously waiting to see what’s going to happen.

Consulting sat down with Terry Stone, Health & Life Sciences Lead for Oliver Wyman, to talk about what comes next for healthcare consulting amidst the uncertainty ahead.

Consulting: If the Affordable Care Act goes
away what will be the immediate impact
on the Healthcare consulting market?

Stone: The biggest immediate impact is
the amount of uncompensated care that
essentially gets thrown back on the books
of the healthcare delivery system. Tens
of millions of who had insurance and the
health systems were being reimbursed are
going to go back to using the ER. Hos-
pitals have to pay for that, and they pass
it along in the form of increased costs
to the insurers, and eventually it hits the
economy in the form of the wallets of the
employers who are providing health insur-
ance. That’s going to put a real strain on
hospitals, but it’s going to put even more
pressure on cost and efficiency, and there’s
probably going to be a lot more strategy
work around portfolio optimization; how
much of what they have is Medicare pa-
tients reimbursed at a certain amount ver-
sus how many commercial patients.

Consulting: How does Trump’s back-
and-forth on the issue present unique
challenges?

Stone: There could be a freezing of action in the market due to uncertainty. There are timelines upon timelines for developing products, filing with regulators, making sure they’ll be viable in the market. With the flip-flopping all over, we can wind up in another situation where there isn’t enough clarity soon enough. So there’ll be some initial work where people are trying to analyze and assess impact, but then there will be a little seizing and freezing when no one’s sure what they’re actually building towards. They’re talking about fundamentally changing benefit structures, fundamentally changing what the tax benefits of employee-sponsored healthcare look like. All these things have huge impacts on what our clients’ products look like, and those are the types of things that could cause people from a consulting standpoint to not move forward until there’s more clarity.