Cliff Notes Version: "The lone health insurance cooperative to make money last year on the Affordable Care Act’s public insurance exchanges is now losing millions and suspending individual enrollment for 2016.
The cooperatives, like other health insurers, have been hit by soaring medical and prescription drug costs. Plus they’ve had to spend money building a network of care providers, negotiating rates with them and then marketing their plans to customers. They have also received considerably less financial support than they expected from a federal government program designed to support insurers as the exchanges got under way."
My Take: When are democrats going to admit that the ACA is a disaster? The intention of the law is noble at its core, but the law was horribly written and the underlying costs of care need to be addressed BEFORE you try to dump 30 million additional people into the system. The end goal of forcing a single payer system onto the American people seems more clear than ever.
Healthcare providers lose money for once in a transition year after decades of blatantly screwing the American public and suddenly now it’s a disaster? I agree, it’s high time people started giving back to the corporations! …which are people too.
Yes, a huge fraud has been perpetrated on the American people and that bothers me. It is obviously not the only fraud perpetrated on the American people, but that doesn’t mean we should just let it go unchallenged. Providing quality, affordable healthcare to all Americans is a noble goal and I fully support it. This law, however, was a POS from day one. I knew it and the frauds that wrote it knew it. The fact that the self-named champions of the people continue to sing its praises is disgusting.
Did you actually read the article? It’s about non-profits set up specifically to provide coverage in ACA exchanges. 1/2 of them have gone under and now every single one of the remaining ones is losing money and likely cannot survive another year. So as it stands, neither non-profits setup specifically for the system nor behemoth insurance companies can operate profitably in a space that was created to provide insurance to the country’s most vulnerable people. Why not just build a beautiful city for the country’s homeless people and then put it on top of an active volcano after you’ve required them to move in?
Still not sure what the issue is here Higgs? They are trying something and its not working. The old system was incredibly terrible, anyone in healthcare knows the system is a money pit. Keep trying stuff, just cause this specific thing isn’t working perfectly doesn’t mean we should conceed and go back to the way it was, which did not work for a ton of americans.
Yawn…trains left the station. Every (3) months another “death of ACA” narrative is trotted out as the house rolls out another “Death to ACA” bill lol. ACA as we now it is nothing more than the very first and very imperfect step towards an eventual evolution towards a more cost effective health care delivery model … necessitated but the limitation placed upon possibilities by entrenched special interests. Obama would be the first to tell you that!
All ACA did is place certain specific standards on what constitutes an actual health insurance product (I think about a dozen standards to insure actual essential coverage and accountability (EZPZ unlike the dozens and dozens of standards that go into make a car suitable for sale in this countrly), assures access to coverage for all, and disallows marketing costs as recoverable among other details. The actual underwriting and coverage still is done by private insurance companies outside of certain transitional protections offered to the market.
Too bad about the losses and the “creative destruction” and the institutions claiming losses and the need to leave, perhaps it will get us to a “single payer” model that much quicker where we can begin to throw the weight of our collective insurable pool behind our spending leverage.
Hmm normally, I would agree that you try 10 things and one will survive. However, big government projects are like big ships. You cannot change course quickly or without huge costs. Furthermore, the cost of each program is somehow 10x as much when the government implements it. There were 4 guys in Silicon Valley who said, hey let’s help, and they built the equivalent of the $200 million ACA website in their free time. Somehow, they were ignored.
My opinion is that the correct option for the US is the private HMO model (i.e. Kaiser Permanante hospitals), just because every entity in healthcare otherwise has incentive to lie to and mess with one another. It would be great if the US could do this at an administrative level, but political friction prevents this from happening. Private providers would be allowed to fail or evolve more efficiently.
My 2016 medical insurance premiums will be over 200% higher than my 2014 premiums. Similar coverage, smaller network. My previous policy, which I was very happy with, was outlawed… Amazing that the American public was flat out lied to and most don’t seem to care. What are people doing that live paycheck to paycheck?
No no no Ghibli. If you like your coverage you can keep it, remember?
To answer your question poor people are still uninsured from what I can tell. The IRS forms have A-Z of exemptions for the penalties, and half the people I do taxes for as volunteer work for say they are insured when they’re not, which we take as truth. And they know that poor people never get audited.
My share of my health insurance is dropping $2 per biweekly pay so there is that? The whole system is a money pit, insurance is a complete scam. Someone truly needs to figure out a better way because insurance companies are not it.
Of course it is. Dude is not brain dead. And everyone knows if we could get insurance company margins under control, they rival Apple’s, our medical costs would come way down.
Lol you are a wing nut Ghibli. I never said anything like that but go listen to some more supply side podcasts followed by some climate denying lecturers. I can only imagine you feel persecuted for being a Christian in America. And higg I’ll have to check nothing changed but I believe co-pay and deductible are the same at 10 & 500 respectively