Looking for An “ObamaCare” Health Co-Op? Good Luck.
Remember that truly asinine exercise in socialist idiocy healthcare “innovation” called the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act – AKA “ObamaCare”? Remember how it was supposed to use “nonprofit healthcare cooperatives” as an integral part of its design?
Well, as I’ve written before here those cooperatives haven’t exactly been doing that well. As of March, roughly half of them had gone bankrupt.
Last week, the axe fell on another two ObamaCare cooperatives: HealthyCT and Oregon’s Health Co-Op. The former is now operating under an order of supervision, having recently been ordered to pay the CMS risk adjustment program more than $13M. The latter is being placed into receivership and liquidated.
A third cooperative had already gone belly-up between March and last week. This means that of the original 23 ObamaCare cooperatives, only 8 remain in operation. The rest have all failed. And those that are still in business aren’t doing so well.
These new failures aren’t exactly a surprise, either. Back in March – when 11 of the cooperatives still were in operation – only 1 was expected to finish the year “in the black”. The rest were collectively expected to lose in excess of $200M total – and it looks like that may well turn out to be accurate.
That’s not exactly a sustainable business model.
And that’s not all. We still haven’t seen the large expected premium hikes experts say we’ll see for next year – and which will be announced this fall.
So if you need to use one of those ObamaCare cooperatives to procure health insurance – best of luck to ya. Either way (no cooperative serving your area, or too expensive) you may well be SOL.
Sheesh. When it came to this ridiculous concept, even Stevie Wonder could have told Congress he could see failure down the road.
Well, he could have had they let him read the bill before passing it.
Category: Health Care debate
They planned it to fail, their ultimate goal has always been a one payer Gov run healthcare.
Exactly, these commies are devious and patient.
True, but it never would have succeeded but for that bastard John Roberts who, knowing that law was flagrantly unconstitutional when viewed through the appropriate lens that is the Interstate Commerce Clause, contrived a fanciful perspective that the law’s mandates were taxes which, of right, were within the purview of the House to set. The moment hell freezes over, I will forgive him, the bastard.
You are absolutely correct.
Geezo Pete, I just had a flashback to the 1960s and the free clinics set up by med school/nursing students to serve the hippie community. Anyone heard from any of them lately?
Yeah, reality bites – like we usedta say.
The Black Panthers set up such clinics, later to be embraced by city government health departments and taxpayer funded.
Anything the Preezy of the 57 Steezy touches turns to shit… he has a reverse Midas touch.
Millard Fillmore has more positive accomplishments than Teh One!
If Government was even remotely capable of running health care, 0bamacare would have been unnecessary because Medicare and Medicaid would have done that. Can anyone name anything that doesn’t get turned to shit by Government bureaucracies?
Looks like they took that “non-profit” thing to heart…
None of us are surprised I’m sure….the sad part is the large number of people who are negatively impacted by the sudden loss of coverage who were promised something more.
No one seems to actually care about those people. They’ve become pawns in this game over healthcare. That’s truly unacceptable at this point. Our government required them to obtain this coverage upon pain of punishment if they fail to do so, and now the coverage they are required by law to have will not be available from the few places they were forced to use to obtain the coverage.
It’s a very Kafka-esque outcome when viewed from a short distance.
Fukit. We warned them this was going to happen but they decided that the outcome would be different because they snorted enough lines of hope and change off a mirror.
Well, when large segments of American society seem to function with the IQ of a retarded newt, this is what you get.
Alas …
They function that way because our educational system is far more about reduce, reuse, recycle and sex education than about reading, writing, arithmetic, and logic. It’s intentional that American children are dumbed down, drugged up (Ritalin, etc.), and mesmerized by mind-numbing TV. It’s all about control of the populace, and always has been.
WORD!!
In the words of the late Fred Thompson, “This thing is going to get out of control, and we’ll be lucky to live through it.”
And then we’ll have the biggest naval battle since Jutland?
If only they would let loose some forensic accountants on those co-ops and see where all the money actually went.
It would likely be simultaneously hilarious, maddening and depressing.
For co-ops to work, people have to join and participate in them. Oregon State had several working well into the 1950’s, until it was decided they were too socialist (socialist=communist) and allowed to die on the vine. The co-ops were modeled after the Israeli sick funds. I always wonder why we lionize the Israelis but somehow never criticize them for having socialized medicine.
I’ve been to Israel and trained with Isrealis in the US, but I never talked to them about their Health Care system.
Friends of mine in England and Australia have socialized medicine but complain of long waits, little choice and outright refusal of modalities of care for themselves and their families. So, unlike burger king, apparently, ya don’t get it your way.
One of the big hindrances in socialized medicine here is the propensity for our government to bugger up anything it touches and line their pockets.
The world benefits from the competition in research and technology here in the US…threats of decreased revenues for those endeavors or a complete take over in regulation by the government would drive a lot of brilliant people out of the health care fields. Russian policies ruined the training and quality of their physicians….of course that raises the commerce clause conundrum and things get really heated at that point and just spiral into a maelstrom.
I have no quick answers, but the problem is multi-factorial here, to say the least.