Andy Slavitt — President Obama’s choice to manage Obamacare, Medicare and Medicaid — was linked seven years ago to a massive medical data fraud scheme that resulted in what was then the largest settlement ever by an insurance company.
If he is confirmed by the Senate, Slavitt will head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid, which manages the federal government’s three biggest health care programs. He will manage an estimated $1 trillion in benefits that are paid to millions of doctors, patients and hospitals.
When the ACA networks began covering patients in 2014, one of the first complaints was that many plans were trying to cut costs by including many fewer providers in their networks than pre-ACA health plans. In some cases, patients even had to cancel previously scheduled surgeries and lost access to prescription drugs, since the surgeons and/or the hospitals were not in their new networks. Now, a study by the health consulting firm Avalere confirms that these were not isolated cases – on average, exchange plans include a 34 percent fewer in-network providers than non-exchange plans (such as employer-sponsored plans), with even larger shortcomings in specialties like oncology and cardiology.
The people running ObamaCare set low expectations and then consistently fail to meet them, but could the expectations at least stop plunging? Witness the recent “secret shopper” audit that unmasked the entitlement’s wide-open exposure to fraud and the lack of any plan to prevent it.
A new report from a government watchdog examining the success of taxpayer-funded Obamacare co-ops found that the vast majority lost money last year and struggled to enroll consumers, throwing their ability to repay the taxpayer-funded loans into question.
During the legislative debate over the passage of President Obama’s healthcare law, supporters of the program were sensitive to any suggestion that it represented a government takeover of the healthcare system.
Almost all of Obamacare’s landmark health insurance co-ops are in financial trouble.
The co-ops were invented by the health-care law — they’re private nonprofits that were awarded a total of $2.4 billion in loans from the federal government, in order to establish nonprofit competition to private health insurance companies.
The federal government shelled out $2.4 billion in loans to a series of non-profit health plans under Obamacare, but now they’re struggling to stay alive.
The plans, dubbed CO-OPs (Consumer Operated and Oriented Plans) were intended to increase competition in the insurance market and serve as a check on private insurers by providing an alternative that wasn’t focused on profit. They were a compromise measure intended to satisfy liberals who wanted the law to set up a fully government-run health insurance option.
Unless conservatives change their strategy soon, history is likely to record them as the unintended enablers of Obamacare’s expansion. Yet another key moment for a turn toward free-market reform is upon us. Will congressional Republicans again pursue a strategy that sounds serious but results in Obamacare’s unimpeded implementation? Or will they try to actually impede the law in real time and make clear to the American people which party is on their side as we approach 2016?
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has taken formal action in response to concerns about the finances of four of the new nonprofit, member-owned CO-OP health plans, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General (HHS OIG).
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell championed a renewed push to bypass a filibuster and repeal Obamacare with 51 votes on Tuesday, he announced in a joint statement with Utah Senator Mike Lee, one of the most conservative Republicans in the chamber.