HealthSpan, the insurance arm of Catholic health system Mercy Health, is getting rid of its medical group and halting sales of ObamaCare policies just two years after acquiring Kaiser Permanente’s Ohio subsidiary. Spokesman Chuck Heald said HealthSpan will stop selling individual and small-group health plans on the ObamaCare exchanges to focus more on Medicare and employer plans. HealthSpan jacked up premium rates for 2016 individual and small-group plans anywhere from 9% to 32% to account for the sicker-than-expected exchange population.
According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the United States spends $8,713 per person on health care — more than double the OECD average. But under ObamaCare, that high level of spending isn’t buying the best care. The law’s numerous regulations and intrusions have simply inflated the nation’s healthcare tab — without actually improving the quality of care available to patients. The US has long spent more than other nations on care. ObamaCare has just accelerated that trend, despite the law’s goal of reducing health spending. Last year, health expenditures jumped 5.3%, up from an average of 3.9% over the previous six years, according to data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
The Obama administration created a “risk corridor” program to help prop up insurers who lost money in the first three years of ObamaCare where profitable insurers would pay some of those profits into a pool to help insurers who lost money. If the amount insurers lost exceeded what the companies paid in, the government would step in and make up the difference. Calling this “a taxpayer-funded bailout for insurance companies,” Rubio last year quietly inserted language into the omnibus government spending bill that barred the Department of Health and Human Services from dipping into general funds to pay failing insurers. “While the Obama administration can still administer the risk-corridor program, for one year at least, they won’t be able to use taxpayer funds to bail out insurance companies,” Rubio said.
With the Affordable Care Act crumbling, progressive activists are all but guaranteed to grab the opportunity that this single-payer ballot measure represents. But if Coloradans truly want better health care at a lower cost for more people, they shouldn’t vote for another one-size-fits-all government program. They should vote for proposals—and politicians—that will give patients more choices.
Jeff Anderson argues that ObamaCare has an incurable preexisting condition: It eats away at the private insurance market on which it relies. That market cannot survive ObamaCare’s hubristic mandates, and ObamaCare cannot survive the collapse of that market. On their present course, both are doomed. The challenge for conservatives is to figure out how, upon the law’s repeal, to rescue private insurance. If conservatives don’t save that market, liberals will—only it will no longer be a market for private insurance, and there will no longer be millions of purchasers, but just one.
UnitedHealth Group won’t pay brokers commissions on sales of individual health plans in most states where it participates in Obamacare exchanges, a move that will likely discourage market demand for its plans in those states. The News & Observer reports the Minnetonka-based insurance giant notified North Carolina brokers of the policy change Friday, not long after it announced plans to evaluate whether it would continue to serve the public exchange markets after 2016.
A Plain Dealer analysis of plans offered through healthcare.gov, the exchange website, shows that deductibles, co-pays, and co-insurance expenses are putting up significant barriers to accessing medical care, particularly for middle-income earners. The average deductible for a silver-level plan – among the most affordable options for someone with medical needs – is $3,561 in Cuyahoga County for a 40-year-old male earning $30,000, according to the analysis. The maximum annual out-of-pocket expense for that individual averages $6,277.
About 4,500 Medical University of South Carolina patients currently covered by Consumers’ Choice Health Plan need to pick a new policy by Tuesday to remain insured on Jan. 1. Medical University Hospital CEO Pat Cawley told the MUSC Board of Trustees on Thursday that the announcement created “an administrative nightmare.”
Only 35% of 67,000 Consumers’ Choice customers across the state have selected a new plan so far.
The two-year “Cadillac tax” delay under consideration by Congress is the worst kind of special-interest legislation. It will enrich labor unions and big business at the expense of taxpayers. ObamaCare’s Cadillac tax is a clunky but constructive first step in reforming the employer tax exclusion. It has problems—its structure as an excise tax is punitive, and it contains carveouts for favored Democratic constituencies—but the basic idea of equalizing the tax treatment of employer- and individually-purchased health insurance is a good one.
The lone health insurance cooperative to make money last year on the ObamaCare insurance exchanges is now losing millions and suspending individual enrollment for 2016. Maine’s Community Health Options lost more than $17 million in the first nine months of this year, after making $10.9 million in the same period last year. A spokesman said higher-than-expected medical costs have hurt the co-op. An Associated Press review of financial statements from 10 of the 11 surviving co-ops shows that they lost, on average, more than $21 million in the first nine months of this year.