A 10th co-op created under Obamacare has collapsed. Combined, the failed nonprofit insurance companies have received more than $1 billion in loans, with more than 600,000 consumers affected. The latest casualty, the Utah Insurance Department, announced yesterday that Arches Health Plan, a consumer-oriented and operated plan, or co-op, will not sell insurance in 2016. The co-op received $89.7 million in loans from the federal government.
Consumers shopping for health insurance on healthcare.gov will see premiums increase by an average of 7.5 percent, according to data released by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services on Monday. Open enrollment begins on Sunday, Nov. 1.
Many health plans sold through the Affordable Care Act in 2015 are so limited they don’t offer patients access to some medical specialists such as endocrinologists, rheumatologists and psychiatrists, a new study suggests. That may be forcing some patients to pay thousands of dollars out of their own pockets for any care provided by these specialists.
Some health insurance plans sold on the Affordable Care Act’s federal marketplace may not provide reasonable access to medical specialists, new research suggests. Under the act, also known as Obamacare, the federal marketplace offers subsidized private health insurance to consumers in states that didn’t establish their own health insurance exchanges.
Monday night’s spending agreement between the White House and Congress would repeal part of the Affordable Care Act. But the provision is a narrow one that few people knew existed and even fewer supported enthusiastically. The Obama administration had stalled writing the rules that would have put it into effect and, with no signs of imminent action, most Washington insiders figured it was only a matter of time before Congress took it off the books anyway. For better or worse, or maybe a bit of both, the provision was the regulatory equivalent of a dead man walking.
Proponents of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) have frequently pointed to official cost estimates projecting that the law will reduce federal budget deficits. Much less attention has been paid to the primary reason for this favorable outlook: the law’s heavy reliance on indexing important provisions to restrain spending and increase revenue. These components of the ACA will automatically impose perpetual, across-the-board cuts on payments to certain institutional medical providers; increase premiums for lower-income households; and raise taxes on an ever-expanding segment of taxpayers.
Arches Health Plan, a membership cooperative that was born out of the Affordable Care Act and insures 66,000 Utahns, has been ordered out of the insurance market for 2016. Arches insures more low-income Utahns on the federal exchange, healthcare.gov, than any other company besides Select Health. But it also has customers who get their insurance on their jobs and individuals who buy plans through insurance agents or brokers.
The table below presents an update to our previous analysis of 2016 changes in premiums for the second-lowest cost (“benchmark”) silver marketplace plans in major cities in the 49 states and the District of Columbia, where we were able to find complete data on rates. Among these major cities, the percent change from last year in the benchmark premium ranges from -10.6% in Seattle, Washington to 38.4% in Nashville, TN. The simple average of these rate changes is 10.1% before accounting for the premium tax credit.
The next Open Enrollment period for the Health Insurance Marketplace begins on November 1, 2015 for coverage starting on January 1, 2016. According to an HHS analysis, about 8 out of 10 returning consumers will be able to buy a plan with premiums less than $100 dollars a month after tax credits; and about 7 out of 10 will have a plan available for less than $75 a month. Highlights of the 2016 Marketplace Affordability Snapshot include:
About 70% of those who return to the federal insurance exchange when open enrollment starts Nov. 1 will pay less than $75 a month after they receive tax credits, a government analysis released Monday shows. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services also reported that for this third open enrollment about 80% of consumers shopping again on Healthcare.gov will be able to pay less than $100 a month after tax credits.