Category: Impact

Highmark Health lost $590 million in its health plans that were sold on the ACA exchange in 2015. Highmark is still owed $500 million under the risk-corridor program, and HHS has said it will find a way to fund the program. Highmark Health CEO, David Holmberg said Highmark has met with government officials “regularly to discuss how they plan to honor their commitment.”

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Obama promised that Obamacare would “save all of us money and reduce pressures on emergency rooms all across the country.” However, a new report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows, that by doling out insurance coverage to millions more people without doing anything to address America’s growing doctor shortage, the president’s health reform law may make the ER crisis even worse.

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The Affordable Care Act has created many problems and the American people are left with rising costs, and higher taxes, mountains of red tape, and arrogant bureaucratic attacks on personal and religious liberty.

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The pharmaceutical industry, insurers and the Obama administration all want prescription drugs to be included in determinations about whether a certain pools of patients are riskier than others.

The determinations are important because insurers who take on riskier sets of patients are eligible to receive compensation under Obamacare. Right now, those determinations are made using just medical claims.

Drug companies and insurers generally agree that prescription drugs should be included in the risk adjustment models. They currently are not.

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Obamacare to date has failed miserably relative to what was originally promised regarding how many people would get covered and the number of these who would obtain their coverage through the Obamacare exchanges.

The president’s claim that “America is on a stronger footing because of the Affordable Care Act” is dubious at best. Literally no major promise made for this law has been kept and some have been broken quite egregiously.

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Most of the remaining non-elderly uninsured people in the U.S. likely won’t gain coverage, a new study released this week suggests.

The study, from the Urban Institute says that while some higher-income people who are uninsured will surely gain coverage as the penalties for not having insurance increase, the possibility for increased coverage is actually lower among those who have higher incomes than those who are eligible for financial assistance to cover insurance.

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The Congressional Budget Office projects millions of workers will leave employer-sponsored health plans over the next decade because of ObamaCare.

Some will opt to go on Medicaid, but others will be kicked off their company plans by employers who decide not to offer coverage anymore, according to a new CBO report titled,  “Federal Subsidies for Health Insurance Coverage for People Under Age 65: 2016 to 2026.”

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According to a Blue Cross Blue Shield Association report, people who enrolled in health insurance through the ACA appear to be sick than expected. People who enrolled in individual health insurance plans after 2014 were less healthy and used more healthcare in 2014 and 2015 than those who were already enrolled in individual plans and those who receive insurance through their employer.

The report isn’t without its shortcomings. It looked only at BCBS plans, not the entire universe of Obamacare insurers. But that’s still a sizable sample. BCBS companies participate in the exchanges more than any other insurer.

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In a report, the Department of Health and Human Services said Monday that there are around two million low-income, uninsured people in those 20 states who have a mental illness or substance abuse disorder.

Medicaid has long been a joint federal-state program that offers near-free care to the very poor. Under the health law, Washington pays almost all of the costs of insuring people who have slightly higher incomes.

Opponents of expansion argue that neither states nor the federal government can afford to further swell the program, and that a shortage of providers to treat the newly insured poses an additional challenge in trying to enroll more people in it.

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Gonshorowski and Haislmaier examined the effects of the law’s new insurance regulations they found the three most costly ones—age rating restrictions, benefit mandates, and minimum actuarial value requirements—increased the cost of the previously available least expensive plans in a state by 41 percent to 51 percent for younger adults (the group most likely to be uninsured), and by 1 percent to 18 percent for pre-retirement-age adults.