Iowa’s insurance commissioner filed a lawsuit against the federal government on Tuesday, saying it is withholding $20 million in connection with the liquidation of not-for-profit insurer CoOportunity Health — which failed in December 2014.
“Through the wind down of CoOportunity, we’ve worked collaboratively with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the federal government on many issues,” said Insurance Commissioner Nick Gerhart in a news release. “In this instance, we tried diligently to settle our differences with the federal government in extensive discussions over several months, but were informed by the Department of Justice that further negotiations would be futile.”
Gerhart said U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and CMS have “tried to jump to the head of the creditor line,” and are not following Iowa or federal law.
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More Democrats seem to be having doubts about the federal health care law, a contentious issue for most of President Barack Obama’s tenure and one of the defining elements of his legacy.
With the administration counting down its final year, Sen. Bernie Sanders’ call for “Medicare for all” appears to have rekindled aspirations for more ambitious changes beyond “Obamacare.”
That poses a challenge for Hillary Clinton, who has argued that the health care law is working and the nation should build on it, not start over.
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Six years after the introduction of Obamacare, Americans are still divided over the controversial health reform law even though most tend to support many parts of the measure, a new HealthDay/Harris Poll found.
However, none of the current crop of presidential candidates appears to inspire much hope that they’ll properly handle health care policy if elected, the poll results show.
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Nearly 25% of Americans surveyed last September who had coverage through employer plans, the Affordable Care Act exchanges, or individual plans outside the exchanges reported problems paying family medical bills in the previous 12 months, according to the Urban Institute’s Health Reform Monitoring Survey, released last month. That compared with 16% of people on Medicaid and 27.8% of uninsured individuals who said they had problems with medical bills.
The Kaiser Family Foundation reached similar findings through focus group interviews with 91 low-income Medicaid and exchange-plan enrollees in six cities during January and February 2016.
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Insurers are in the process of filing proposed premiums for ACA-compliant nongroup plans that will be available inside and outside of Marketplaces in 2017.
Recent reports by insurers about their experiences during the first two years under the ACA suggest that some assumed that enrollees would be healthier than they turned out to be and set their premiums too low, leading in some cases to significant financial losses for ACA-compliant plans and an expectation that premiums could rise faster in 2017. Some insurers took relatively large premium increases for 2016 to better match premium levels with the costs of their enrollees — which would help to offset the need for 2017 premium increases — but it is too soon to know if these efforts were generally successful or whether losses have continued into 2016.
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It already looks clear that many Obamacare insurance plans are going to raise their prices significantly.
Over the last few years, average premium increases in the ObamaCare markets have been lower than the increases for people who bought their own insurance in premiums before the Affordable Care Act. But several trends are coming together that suggest that pattern will break when plan premiums are announced in early November. Many plans may increase prices by 10 percent, or more.
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