The operators of Maryland’s health insurance Web site improperly stored Social Security numbers and other customer information while awarding millions of dollars in contracts without ensuring the money would be spent properly, according to a state audit released Friday.
The audit is the latest in a string of reports uncovering loose spending and rushed decision-making involving the once-troubled Maryland Health Benefit Exchange, which the state hurried to create to help enact President Obama’s ambitious federal health-care overhaul.
Stephanie Douglas signed up for health insurance in January with the best intentions. She had suffered a stroke and needed help paying for her medicines and care. The plan she chose from the federal insurance exchange sounded affordable — $58.17 a month after the subsidy she received under the Affordable Care Act.
But Ms. Douglas, 50, who was working about 30 hours a week as a dollar store cashier and a services coordinator at an apartment complex for older adults, soon realized that her insurance did not fit in her tight monthly budget. She stopped paying her premiums in April and lost her coverage a few months later.
ObamaCare costs will jump next year for exchange customers, one way or the other. Premiums are set to spike by more than 20% in at least 16 states. But, for many, the real sticker shock will be soaring deductibles that mean they’ll get few benefits until they’ve racked up huge bills.
Low-end bronze plans have deductibles hitting $6,850 in 2016. Now insurers are hiking silver-plan deductibles as high as $6,500 as a way to keep a lid on premiums. The downside isn’t just more out-of-pocket costs for patients; it also will have a ripple effect of reducing taxpayer subsidies for cheaper plans.
Late last month, Hillary Clinton began releasing the details for her vision for health reform.
That vision is little more than Obamacare on steroids. “I will defend the Affordable Care Act, but as president I want to go further,” the Democratic presidential hopeful said at a recent community forum in Iowa. “I want to strengthen the Affordable Care Act.”
The two largest state health insurance co-operatives created as part of a grand ObamaCare experiment have announced they are closing at the end of this year, joining others that have failed and even more that are insolvent and likely to fail.
The Kentucky Health Cooperative announced on Friday it is going out of business and will not enroll new members next year, leaving 51,000 members to find other coverage. It had the second-largest co-op enrollment in the country, garnering 75% of people who enrolled in coverage through the state’s health exchange.
The largest private provider of health insurance policies on Kynect, Kentucky’s health insurance exchange, is going out of business.
The Louisville-based Kentucky Health Cooperative Inc. announced Friday that it will end current memberships on Dec. 31 and will not add new members because of financial problems. It will not offer health insurance plans on Kynect when open enrollment for 2016 coverage starts on Nov. 1.
Apparently not. For every person who has obtained insurance in the (Obamacare) exchanges, there are two other eligible people who have not enrolled. We now have a good idea why that is.
When people who were previously insured in the individual market obtain insurance in the exchanges, on the average they are worse off. And here is a surprise. When the previously uninsured obtain insurance in the exchanges, they are also worse off.
The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is the law of the land and will likely continue to be for some time, despite opponents’ best efforts to get it thrown out in court.
But what the law will look like a few years down the line is anybody’s guess. In fact, the landmark legislation has already been changed significantly since it was originally enacted more than five years ago.
Mercy will be the 58th rural hospital to close in the United States since 2010, according to one research program, and many more could soon join the list because of declining reimbursements, growing regulatory burdens and shrinking rural populations that result in an older, sicker pool of patients. The closings have accelerated over the last few years and have hit more midsize hospitals like Mercy, which was licensed for 75 beds, than smaller “critical access” hospitals, which are reimbursed at a higher rate by Medicare.
A new breed of health insurers created under the Affordable Care Act — representing one of the government’s most innovative attempts in decades to foster better coverage — is on shaky financial ground in many of the 23 states where the plans began.
The nonprofit health plans were envisioned as a consumer-friendly counterweight to for-profit insurers, a way to provide more competition, greater consumer choice and better coverage in markets typically dominated by big commercial carriers. The government allocated billions of dollars in loans for them.