Snap Map hasn't become ubiquitous, Snap's Original Shows still aren't premium enough to drag in tons of new users, Discover is a clickbait-overloaded mess, and Instagram has already copied the best parts of its ephemeral messaging.
In addition, Vuclip's user base is not yet premium enough to merit high CPMs: the majority of devices, he says, are "the Asha's of this world, not the Galaxy's," referring to Nokia's low-end smartphones and Samsung's high-end Android devices.
But analysts said that, unlike Aetna, other H.M.O.'s had raised premiums enough and kept sufficient control of costs to meet their earnings targets this year.
In addition, insurers have been struggling with what is known as a "soft" market, in which competition for new business is intense and companies have a hard time raising premiums enough to cover all the risks they bear.
All of this indicates that insurers — relieved of the pressure to cover the least healthy among the previously uninsured — lowered premiums enough that others, not benefiting from Medicaid, could afford to purchase policies in the private market.
The Cigna Corporation, the health insurer, said yesterday that it was cutting more than 3,000 jobs as it revamps itself after failing to raise health premiums enough to cover medical costs.
The premium was enough to prompt Jeff Immelt, the chief executive of General Electric -- no stranger to the manufacture of nuclear reactors, including those at the hobbled Daiichi facility -- to tell The Financial Times last summer that nuclear power had become "hard to justify".
Suppose an insurance company were to offer a prescription drug plan, with premiums high enough to cover the cost of insuring an average Medicare recipient.
WellPoint, he said, raises premiums just enough to stay ahead of the annual increases it faces in its payments to doctors and hospitals -- something known in the business as the medical trend.
Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton has proposed mandatory coverage for all Americans, similar to the Massachusetts plan, while Senator Barack Obama would require coverage only for children, promising to make premiums affordable enough for adults that no mandate would be necessary.
But the alternative to those decisions is the system we have now — one that features unacceptably spotty care, a Medicare program on the path to insolvency and insurance premiums high enough to eat up workers' pay increases.
