Hillary Clinton’s prescription to soothe the economic hangover consumers have from ObamaCare’s regulatory binge is a single ingredient: more regulation. Mrs. Clinton begins her treatment plan by focusing on “price gouging” by pharmaceutical companies and the need for price regulation.
The similarities between the original Hillarycare and Obamacare are striking. Both plans were built around the concept of “exchanges” — originally called “Health Insurance Purchasing Cooperatives” in Hillarycare. Both plans relied on an employer mandate. Both had minimum federal benefit requirements, and federal preemption of the traditional state role in the regulation of health insurance. Both saw an extensive role for federal agencies in establishing the health benefits that a consumer must have access to, and those services that wouldn’t be available.
The enrollee share of premiums in the health insurance program for federal employees and retirees will rise by 7.4 percent on average in 2016, the largest increase since 2011, the government announced Tuesday.
Health Republic of New York, the largest Obamacare co-op in the country, was ranked as the worst health insurance company in complaints in 2014, according to the New York State Department of Financial Services.
State regulators ordered Health Republic Friday to stop writing insurance policies as it was no longer qualified to provide health insurance policies under New York state standards. Health Republic is the sixth of 23 health insurance co-ops funded by Obamacare since 2011 at a cost of $2.4 billion.
Republicans will seek to repeal a range of ObamaCare taxes as well as the healthcare law’s mandates to buy insurance through the fast-track process known as reconciliation.
President Obama is sure to veto the measures, but reconciliation will allow them to at least reach his desk, bypassing an expected Senate Democratic filibuster. The process is kicking into gear now because it is also being used in an attempt to defund Planned Parenthood, part of an effort to target the organization by means other than risking a government shutdown.
The House on Monday passed legislation to nix an upcoming Obamacare mandate requiring employers with 51 to 100 employees to shift the health coverage they offer to plans on the small-group market.
On September 25, 2015, the Nevada Division of Insurance (“Division”) filed a petition in the Eighth Judicial District Court in Clark County to place the Nevada Health CO-OP (NHC) into a conservation/rehabilitation receivership. If the Court grants the petition, the Commissioner of Insurance will become the Receiver of the insurance company.
A federal program designed to aid federally created health plans such as the Louisiana Health Cooperative Inc. instead became the final nail in the ailing nonprofit’s coffin.
Louisiana Health — taken over by state regulators on Sept. 1 — was one of 23 plans created nationally under the Affordable Care Act to ensure there would be competition among health insurers. Altogether the co-ops received more than $2.4 billion in low-interest federal loans to get started. Only two have proven to be profitable amid restrictions that experts say have hampered the co-ops’ development.
Mergers are sweeping health care, as insurers, hospitals and doctors seek economic shelter from Washington by linking up and getting big.
These merger trends were underway prior to Obamacare. But there’s little question that the law purposely hastened these developments.
Five years after passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), progressives are now releasing plans to expand on the legislation. The most recent plan has a lot in common with the ACA, including substantially increasing the costs for both taxpayers and consumers once again.